


Mister Robots (Steampunk AU)

by orphan_account



Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: AI, AU, Bertie is an ass sorry, Bertram Wooster - Freeform, Biting, Classism, Competent!Bertie, Consensual Sex, Consent, Fanart, Fingering, Happy Ending, Illustrated, Injury, Jooster, M/M, Manipulation, OCs - Freeform, Oral Sex, Racism, Reginald Jeeves - Freeform, Rimming, Rockmetteller Todd, Sex, Sex Toys, Slash, Spanking, Steampunk, Unreliable Narrator, Wooster/Jeeves, Wooster/Todd, allusions to canon, compound words suck, human!Jeeves is already dead at the beginning of the fic, implied sex, lite angst, lite body horror, lite dom/sub, m/m - Freeform, meandering plot, no children are harmed in this fic, one spank actually but gotta tag, physical violence, robot self-harm, robot!Jeeves, scientist!Rocky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-23 20:35:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 23,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12516028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “What this country wants is about five million robots (Good title for a play — Mister Robots), who would do all the dirty jobs.”From P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters.Wooster, a robot designer who specialises in adding unintentionally humorous human/computer interactions to charming yet practical sculpts, remakes his schoolboy crush, the family butler. He gives the robot’s AI some oomph from his erstwhile friend-with-benefits Rocky Todd, an American programmer who codes for the ‘entertainment’ market.Through self-determination and Rocky’s help, the robot becomes the Jeeves of Bertie’s dreams, and then the Jeeves of Jeeves’ dreams.Read the tags! Heed the warnings! The human Jeeves is dead, but there is a robot Jeeves, so I didn’t use the Major Character Death archive warning.





	1. The Ganymede line

New York in August is the perfect weather for a trip back to London. I scratched behind my ear with the tweezers, and readjusted the helping hands. The mugginess had seeped in from outside, loosening the loupe I’d jammed into my eye socket. I squinted around it as it threatened to slip out and land smack in the fiddly bits I was working on. I was stuck to my desk like a wad of gum. If I could finish up this ticker and prep the wetware, I’d dashed well make that London trip a dream come true. Surely one can be in London and _not_ be engaged? Scores of other fellows manage it.

Ah — sorry. I’ve bunged you straight into the _medias res_ , with nary a word on why the last of the Woosters is languishing in New York.

In a word – _aunts_. Aunts come in a bewildering range, yet despite their vast differences they all hold to one common purpose: the perpetuation of the Wooster name. Putting the Atlantic’s three thousand miles of pond between the Wooster corpus and the aunts was step one in retaining one’s prized bachelorhood.

I’d beaten the aunts to the gangway by a nose — I am a rather beaky fellow. Between the bone-rattling bellows of my overbearing Aunt Dahlia and the skin-blistering screams of my Aunt Agatha, I had scarcely made myself heard to the ship’s steward as I presented the navy blue of my passport and the white of my ticket. Bury me in those colours, they're pure luck. 

My shoulders didn’t descend from about my ears until the first green swizzle on a salver was served to me in the first class lounge. I’m unashamed to tell you that the only beazel I have ever looked to with longing is the Lady Liberty. I am the last of the Woosters, and contrary to the purpose of my aunts, I have every intention of so remaining. Step two… well, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

So now you are all caught up with Wooster, B., model designer, New York. The old York is miles away. I was in my New York flat, working on one of my custom models and contemplating the risks of a return trip to London.

I flexed my cramped fingers and bent down to my task, humming along as the gramophone spun out jazz from the heavy black 78s. Dashed difficult, soldering the connectors is. Never got in the habit of using ready-mades, you see. I like to add in bespoke stuff, what they call here a ‘custom’ drive. I suppose the luxury market never misses the _id_ in the below-stairs models, but add in a dash of the real tabasco — I refer to the _id_ — and one gets surprisingly popular secretaries, butlers and housekeepers. 

Oh, yes! I was cranking out man Fridays at an astonishing rate. I call it the Ganymede line. Model making is a colonial industry — across the pond we have far fewer billionaires and an ever greater need for natural discernment on the _curriculum vitae_ of the keeper of the keys. 

A sudden smile cracked my map. Growing up, our butler Jeeves had been a paragon among men. Have I told you about him before? Inimitable. He had discernment falling out of his ears. I hadn’t tried yet to build a model like Jeeves. Which reminds me, one has to watch what one says here on this continent. 

Keep this tucked well under your hat, but after sculpting Jeeves’ face countless times, I finally sculpted myself a full Jeeves. Head to toe. Completely legal, of course. Legal, but far from common. Definitely uncommon, and possibly not _preux_ when seen in a strong light. So I’m not fibbing when I say I hadn’t _built_ a Jeeves. Any building, if I had built — and I hadn’t — would be strictly _malem prohibitum_ in the United States. The one wetware I keep hidden behind all the others only looks like Jeeves. What immortal hand or eye could ever assemble a Jeeves? 

Hmm. What schemas would be required? Which archives loaded? New movements would need to be programmed to account for the height/weight ratios…

I digress.

Now, in the abstract, the models I make are so heavy on the purse that one can hardly experiment, much less follow one’s whims. The billionaires I make them for always want one just like old what’s-his-name next door’s, but more obviously expensive — not that I could ever make Jeeves for anyone other than myself. 

It was Rocky who gave me a boost from sculptor to model maker. Rockmetteller Todd, named for his aunt, a Ms. Rockmetteller, is a scaled-up porcelain shepherd, all ruddy cheeks, flawless brown skin, and artfully tumbling curls. He is a poet at heart — shirt unbuttoned and barefoot, frolicking about and versed in every physical pleasure. I can’t describe it any better than by just telling you that he has a swing in his dining room. Well used. 

In short, he is one of those chaps as popular in New York as the Drones are in London — and just as liable to leave my Aunt Agatha aghast. (I say, I do like a bit of illiteration. Golly, that doesn’t sound right, does it? My dictionary’s in the other room.) So he put me on to it and now we each do our part. Rocky gives me the code for body mechanics, being an expert in the field. I mean to say, the fields of anatomy and physics. Although, to be honest, he is an expert in whatever else you might have got out of ‘body mechanics’, too.

In return for Rocky’s expertise with weights and angles, I give him sculpts and sometimes, clients. Just then, I was working on building a housekeeper for a fizzy drinks magnate, and also training up a secretary for a Boston Brahmin.

“Change us the disc, there’s a good lad, Snoakes.” I called out. I train them at home, you see.

I heard Snoakes mutter, “Change us the disc, change us the disc.” Then he called back, “Change us the scenery, sir?”

Like the limp breeze that was giving the lace curtains a half-hearted tug, I soughed. Training the models past their build takes the starch out of a chap.

“Note: overwrite. Grumbling is level three rapport.” I said. Only my voice is voice-printed to overwrite code.

“Noted, sir.”

“Change us the disc?” I repeated.

“Yes, sir. A refreshment?” He placed a fresh stack of vinyl on the autochanger.

“Oooooh, um, ahem. _Yes, lad._ A brandy and soda.”

“On the balcony, sir?”

“Well played, Snoakes.” I smiled at him. “Note: point.”

“Noted, sir.”

Snoakes was catching on. 

By then, I had only the left side of the model to do, so a break was welcome. It’s a bit like heart surgery, or a brain graft, or a clockwork adjustment, or an egg incubation. Jolly intricate, is what I’m getting at. The piece under the magnifying glass was delicate and growing, all extruding matter and cells and wires. Folks in my line of work call it the _ticker_. If the little grey cells can band together to paint the Mona Lisa or write the 57th sonnet, then a model’s case and connectors weren’t too far-fetched a housing for more wonders yet to consummate.

The wetware for the model I was currently working on was waiting in the chiller — 

What’s that, you ask? _Ticker, wetware, chiller?_ All this bally jargon, what? Wetware is the material I sculpt in, and the chiller is the room I keep the wetware in until the models are ready to be built. The models aren’t made of marble, now, are they? I suppose the man on the street doesn’t think twice about what models are made of. The rare folk who are Rocky’s clients, on the other hand, have opinions.

So, as I say, — in the chiller, and Rocky was coming over later with some code. By this time tomorrow, soon-to-be housekeeper Ms. Mabel Sutter would be ready for in-house buttle training and Mr Cyril Snoakes would be off to train as a secretary. Now, you may have noticed that Sutter isn’t a butler. Well spotted, you. I train all the models as butlers, first. It’s a spiffing way to have them programmed with the coddling the upper classes subconsciously crave, but claim to eschew.

It is my unequivocal opinion, if ‘unequivocal’ is the word I want, that the buttling wheeze sets my models buzzing above the rest. Anticipation. They anticipate. They _suggest_. I use two schemas per model and keep them rather bare of scripts. More often than not, the models fill in the blanks for themselves, based on their contexts and their individual owners, you see, and I’ve never yet had one sent to labour. Not one. Of course one does aim for a Seppings rather than a Purvis or a Butterfield, you know. I speak of the butlers of my own experience, but you get the gist.

I designed Snoakes’ purpose to be completion, be it a goal, or a task, or a what-have-you, and I threw in an instinct for the boundaries of compliance. He has the appearance of a retired pub owner and the aspect of a fellow with a pocketful of toffees. His training was coming along nicely.

“Ah, thank you Snoakes. Biff off, now, would you?”

“Biffing, sir,” he intoned in his mournful tenor. He suddenly skipped up, clicked his heels, and whirled his way back into the living room, coat tails flying. Good lad! Bit of spontaneity is the lime twist in life’s cocktail. One hopes that he’d keep a glimmer of it through the mangle of a job in the city at a hundred hours a week.

“Note. Point!” I shouted. After a moment, Snoakes peeled back the curtain with all the delicacy of a nosy spinster aunt and said in his soupiest voice, “Noted, sir.” 

I giggled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End notes are what I learnt researching for this fic. Mostly I learnt that I have no idea if compound words are two words, one word, or hyphenated. I looked up every single one.  
> The average highs in New York City in August, 1948 (earliest I could find): 26C, 82F, 92% humidity.  
> The average temperature in London in August, 1948: 20.8C, 69F (no humidity data).  
> British Passports were an almost-black navy in the 1930s.  
> The green swizzle cocktail is from "The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy.” Recipe here: http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/recipes/a3829/green-swizzle-drink-recipe/  
> Apparently cocktail and food names are not capitalised unless they include a proper noun.  
> 3,470 miles between London and New York.  
> 78s are made from black resin. Autochangers or record changers were first introduced in the late 1920s.  
> The fizzy drink Coca-cola was number 7 in the top ten Depression-defying stocks of the period 1925-1940.


	2. Shop talk with Rocky

Even though I was more than half done with the ticker (it _is_ a rather delicate job), it was still hours before I was able to call in Rocky. The medical training required to join the organics to the ticker is short and sweet. Deceptively so, because though the training is brief, the painstaking hours to make all the joins are long. I was elbows-deep in Mabel’s chest cavity when Snoakes showed Rocky in. I couldn’t turn my head, but I could hear him.

“Almost ready for you, you yank tinkerman,” I volleyed.

“Ready for you last week, you tarty code-monkey,” he returned.

He wandered over, snapping his gum as he peered at the sculpt laid out on my worktop.

“She’s a pretty one. Sculpt me another?” He slipped his arm under mine and prodded her side. I elbowed him off.

“Hah! Don’t tell me your line of business has any call for one like this. She’s my favourite aunt!”

“The ordinary is extraordinary, Bertie. Anyway, you haven’t got any favourite aunts. Oh! Is this an imaginary aunt?” His hand latched onto my hip.

“Erm. Sort of. This one is almost my Aunt Dahlia, only I’ve made her less shouty. And, less — less — no, more — more _kind_ , anyway.”

“Not more imaginary than that? Oh Bertie, tell me you didn’t pirate your own aunt. You’ve got a terrific imagination, you should use it. I’m all about your imaginary friends. This one looks Mediterranean.”

“Just a dash of variety. Don’t you wish there was more variety in life?” 

He budged up behind me and hooked his chin on my shoulder. I couldn’t stop what I was doing, so I leaned into him a little.

“Bertie, every damn minute of my life is variety. I’ve got your code.”

I nodded. It was the final stage and I kept a good rhythm, a _frisson_ of excitement dancing through me as I neared the crucial moment. Snick - snick - snick — do you play the piano? It’s like doing a run up the keys, pressing each connection into place. As I sank home the last connector, the air changed. It is always the same. Rocky still had to install her programming and I was quite a distance from closing her up, but we _knew_. Rocky reached out and stroked a gentle finger down her side, and we watched as gooseflesh rose across her skin in response.

“It’s magic every time, isn’t it, Bertie?” he whispered.

I tipped my head back and pressed a kiss somewhere stubbly. As a matter of fact, it isn’t magic at all. I suppose one could call it electrical engineering, or biology. But one would be utterly wrong. It’s not quite either. It’s — well, it’s dreadfully boring if you’re Rockmetteller Todd and infinitely fascinating if you’re Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, Esq. It’s the old ‘I say to-may-to, you say to-mah-to,’ only it’s more like, ‘I say organic chemistry, electrical engineering, and sculpture, you say anatomy, physics, and human-computer interaction.’ But even I’d thought it magic, once. An old memory flashed upon that inward eye and I lost myself in the past.

Rocky shifted a bit. 

“Ready for me, Bertie?”

“Mmm, not just yet. While she’s compiling?”

Rocky snickered into my hair and ruined the mood by snapping his gum right by my ear. 

“Not what I meant, but you could persuade me. I’ve got the drive in my pocket and ready to insert.”

I turned around, slipping off the gloves and wrapping them up in my apron. Rocky looked well. His hair was conked and his shirt was open by more buttons than strictly needed, but he’d be irresistible in anything. Plus fours. If he wore shorts, they’d be _sine quibus non_ for every male Manhattanite. I had already steeled myself for the inevitable plaid, so I came even there. 

My fingers were all talced up from the gloves, so I couldn’t do much to be friendly. Then again, I was never sure what was innuendo and what was shop-talk with him.

“I’m never sure what’s innuendo and what’s shop talk with you. Can you get started here and meet me in the bath?” I said.

“Give me five to close her up. Set a timer in your room, won’t you? I’d hate for her to wake up to all this.”

“What do you mean, ‘all this’?” I cast a critical eye about the flat, but it looked the same as always. A tad dusty, perhaps. At least the assembly area was covered with some painter’s drops I had laid down.

“All _this_ ,” he said, giving my bum a smack. “Bertie, I live alone, and I’ll always live alone. Models like this one don’t need the data I plan on generating with you.”

“You live with about five models — “

“ _Entertainers,”_ he corrected.

“Entertainers are still models,” I assured him. “That’s not alone times five.”

“Still not going to share you. Anyhow, if models are such good company, how come you haven’t got one?”

I tutted, and waved at the door. “Snoakes! And after this compiles, Rocky, Sutter. It’s just easier to do one at a time.”

“No, I mean, one of my entertainers. You can’t tell them from natural. No need to mope and yearn when you’ve someone tailor-made.”

That smarted a bit, coming from old Rockmetteller. We’ve been friendly from the first time we met, but it turns out that Rocky will splash about in any pond and yet keep his heart aloof. Says he’s holding out for true love. He’s clamped onto the _idée fixe_ that one day he’ll clap eyes on a chap and holler _‘Eureka!’_ Rocky’s a total genius with natural body movements, and he’s practically psychic in meeting client expectations, but if he has a fault, it’s that he’s an idealist.

A pleasure-monger of an idealist, because of course he has to train his entertainer models up, just as I do my Ganymede ones, for their intended roles. Still, I thought he was pining for love. It was a douse of cold water to discover that the natural was so interchangeable with the sculpted for Rocky. I tried not to sound piqued.

“Ha. Yes. Less chatting and more bathing.”

“For this, I came all the way from Long Island! Where’s the romance?”

You’d think between the two of us that I’d be the poetic chappie, but tripping the light, fantastic toe is more Rocky’s style than mine. For example, I wouldn’t spring romance on a lad in the middle of surgical wiring. 

“Tell you what, Rocky. We’ll race each other in the tub to see who can finish the other off first.”

“That’s the worst idea you’ve ever had! No dice. I’ll think of something — don’t look like that! Something quick.”

He shook his head, smiling, and I left him to his install.

At any rate, we were done, dressed, and finished with suturing long before Mabel Sutter opened her eyes. We were professional to the bone as we started the battery of tests that would run through the night. If I had been perfunctory, dare I say, mechanical, in my affections that night, Rocky never said so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had no idea ‘tinkerman’ is already in slang use. I mean I didn’t think I made it up, but I didn’t realise it’s a thing.  
> ‘Code monkey’ is slang for programmer. It’s also the title of my favourite  Jonathan Coulton song. I hyphenated it because I don’t want to call anybody a monkey, but I figure code-monkey is all right.  
> Surgical gloves were introduced at Johns Hopkins in 1874.  
> Conking is chemical straightening, popular in the 1920s.  
> Plus fours are the trousers that end at the knee for golfing.  
> Sine qua non has two plurals, sine quibus non and sine qua nons.  
> ‘Tailor-made’ has a hyphen, ‘plus fours’ doesn’t.  
> “Com, and trip it as ye go, On the light fantastick toe.” Milton (1645). L’Allegro.


	3. You required a valet

No need to mope and yearn. That’s what Rocky had said, and by Jove, he was right. A tailor-made Jeeves! It was a hot and by no means unripe idea. Rocky is, after all, a romantic at heart. I felt ready to call him to the aid of the party.

“Rocky, dear thing?”

He stirred.

“Rocky, we’ve known each other for years, haven’t we?”

He groaned.

“It’s too damn early for a heart-to-heart, Bertie.”

“No, no, I’ve given up on that.” I brought his hand to my lips and gave it a placating kiss. “You’ve always been perfectly clear.”

I wriggled out of his grip and sat up to meet his eye. When I hove into view, he rolled it.

“I’d like some copies of your schemas next time you drop by.”

“Noooo. Nope. Bertie, come on. You don’t start from the schemas, you start from the client. Now, if you don’t know the client, how the hell are you going to meet their requirements? And they’re not going tell you the type of things they tell me. You’re so — you’re so — ” he looked intently into my eyes, as if he could shoot his thoughts straight into my head. “Bertie, hire it out if you don’t want me to do it.”

“It’s not you.” I girded the loins. “As a matter of fact, we do know the client.” 

As I said it, I could feel sweat prickling under my arms. He kept his gaze steady.

“Do we.” His tone was a bit _frappé_ , but he didn’t pull away. Rocky’s always been good to me.

“I’m taking your advice. I’m making one of my imaginary friends.”

He dithered, setting his sparkling American teeth into his full lower lip.

“Bertie, they’re not really our friends. A hundred years ago you would have called them slaves.”

“We can call it by different names — ”

“It’s that old butler of yours, isn’t it? Aw hell, Bertie, I knew it! You drag that torch around and burn up every real chance for love you get.” 

I could tell Rocky was a little hot under the collar, because his volume increased rapidly, not unlike one of those whistling kettles. 

“Call it by it’s real name, Bertie. You’re making an entertainer. You — ” he grimaced and pointed at me, in case I didn’t realise to whom he referred, “are sculpting a model of someone you knew in real life, without their permission. That’s not imagination, that’s — that’s not art. What’s worse, you’re planning to programme it yourself, — for yourself! For Pete’s sake, are you even getting a psych profile? It’s not healthy, Bertie. It’s illegal!”

I set my jaw, for the Woosters have seen battle. 

“You’ve been trying to get me to sample your entertainers for ages. Now that I’m asking, you’ve gone all ethical.”

“I’m not talking about entertaining, I’m talking about whatever Frankenstein fantasy you’re having about that butler!”

Do you ever get a stinging ache in your fingers when you’re not sure if you’re about to unleash the strongest language at your disposal, or bite back manly tears? Luckily, spending years seven to sixteen away at school had provided me with enough starch to keep the upper lip as stiff as a board. Rocky, however, is American. 

He sat up and hugged his knee, rocking in a distraught manner. After a minute, he looked at me and sighed. Then he spoke in a patient voice that made me want to throw a chair.

“Bertie, you know that clients never know what they want. That’s why we have our jobs. Can’t you see how this will go? A failed build! Geez, Bertie, it’ll be sent straight into labour. You hate that.”

I shot him a pointed look. He tried a different tack, but after the crushingly persuasive power of three aged aunts, Rocky’s good-hearted cajoling fell flatter than an overripe peach from the tree. 

“Can’t you just hire a good time guy? Or, I mean, I could cut you a deal on your own entertainer, if you wait a few months. One of my originals. One that knows what you like, yeah? For when I’m not around.” Then he went for the jugular and drew first blood. “Or, if, if this is so bad, you know, you could man up and get out there and find someone better for you than me.”

He’d jabbed right into the crux of the matter. It wasn’t a case of having someone who was ‘better than’, but rather of having someone in particular. Jeeves — our butler growing up — he had been extraordinary. Beyond competent, he had been essential to our lives, the spark in the engine. It was only at college that I realised what it meant, that he never bothered the maids — and I knew that a certain something about him was the same about me. What’s a boy to do? I had idolised him. I still do.

He must have thought fondly of me as well, the youngest Wooster. The tuck boxes from home always had my favourites, with some Boy’s Own slipped in. He’d taught me how to tie a tie and read an ultra-train table. I thought then, if I’d had half his brain, I would have flown an aeroplane or commanded an army. Now I think he never had the chance to be anything other than restricted by time, place and profession.

I could fix that. Leave it to Wooster.

“I’ll follow the law to the letter, old thing. Or — close enough. Everyone in his family who knew Jeeves when he was young is dead. I’m bound to say, with your schemas as a guide, it won’t be months and months. Right now, I only need some copies to get my feet wet.”

I gave him my cheekiest grin and held my breath. He didn’t look convinced. He had that meditative look that governesses sport as they haul their charges about the pier, stuffing them with sweets whilst dreaming of tossing them over the railing. The situation required strategy. I decided to appeal to his vanity as a coder.

“Are they really as good as natural?” I murmured, gently stroking his temple and tracing down along the edge of his hair. “I can’t see how they could be.”

“Oh absolutely. Better! They’ll never break your heart, for one. Never — they’re a fantastic substitute, Bertie.”

“Well, if you don’t — true love and all that — with me, I mean…”

“I won’t,” he said quickly. “ We’re doing that psych profile, though. Hmmm, you’d need three schemas to start with...”

Bingo!

❧

There’s plenty of green in model-making, not that I’m short of it. I’m oofy with dosh. I don’t roll around in it, but there’s nothing to stop me should the whim arise. So it was that when the arts called me, I had no reason not to answer. My muse must have had a sense of humour, to squeeze me into the arts betwixt the skint and the aesthete.

When I graduated, my aunts began their heckling of me to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance, before I’d tossed my mortarboard into the air. They wanted me to go into business and leave all the marble and chiselling behind. And if your only talent is to make passable faces with some slight variety to them, then there’s just one way to go into business.

You see, it takes all sorts to make a world, unless you’re a model. There are rules. The models must have a look about them, something to distinguish them from humans. They must be uniform in height and build. That’s for the clothing market. At a glance, they must conform to a subspecies of the genus Model: butlers and entertainers but also nurses, waiters, and labourers, _et al_. I suppose it’s so that you can ignore them properly. Limits the artist. Chafes him, if I may say so. And I do say so.

Now you might be envisaging me in a paint-splattered artist’s smock, or perhaps in a surgeon’s gown, with bloodied gloves. The truth is far from it. The wetware is mostly cast from moulds, off-site. I form the heads from clay blanks, make the moulds, and send them off to the bio-labs up in the cold lands of Canada and Alaska. 

All artists turned professionals do as I did (and still do), we sculpt pieces that were never commissioned. And so it was that nestled amongst the stock of wetware stacked in my chiller, hanging between the future Snoakeses and Sutters, stood my _pièce de résistance_. Rocky would have combusted spontaneously if he’d known, but I’d modelled that dear old face a thousand times: bronzed skin, chiselled jaw, and wonky beak. You cannot imagine the hoopla when I finally got it right — unless you happen to be one of the Drones, in which case dial it down a third from the annual do and you’ll have it spot on. In retrospect, having an ‘I’ve finally done it!’ party might have misled the party-goers as to the genesis of the celebration. 

As I said, the wetware was ready to go. Had been, for a while, before I brought it up with Rocky. And it may be that he’s younger than I last saw him, and I had to guess at his height and weight, but I’m pretty keen on the results. Look, I know he’s not human. I know he’s literally made for me. The accuracy of my sculpt notwithstanding, the install would create someone wholly new and unknown to me. Someone wholly new and unknown to me that could probably do that thing Rocky does with his tongue.

At any rate, my very keenness had stayed my hand a year or three. Sculpting a person is all fine and artistic, but building one is legally dodgy. The butler Jeeves of memory has his lawful rights, which is why I hadn’t attempted a build yet.

Until there came the day that, as I stood in the chiller in my greatcoat, pensively chewing a nail and contemplating the bowed head and delicate ear of my _magnum opus_ , it hit me like a whanghee behind the knees. 

It’s the same as thinking the chorus girl’s smile lights up the whole theatre, or finding the fellow in the next seat has a fascinatingly low voice for such a slender frame. The model would follow his programming, and gather his inputs, and fill out his schema, and the next thing you know he would be as realized as you or me. You, probably, because as my aunts continue to tell me, I’m still waiting to be whipped into shape. Why is there no finishing school for men, anyhow?

❧

Having crossed the Rubicon, I shovelled a goodish pile of oof into Rocky’s account, and we got down to it. I’m afraid to say that, in a moment of spiritualism, I allowed the hand of fate to guide me. Rocky called it laziness. I set randomly abbreviated schemas for butler and secretary and housekeeper. Mostly butler, though. 

When the time came, though not disgruntled on the surface, I could see that Rocky was far from being gruntled. When two chaps have touched the sublime, they retain a certain whats-it. Can’t be helped. Rocky sat at my desk and added his entertainer files to the ticker with a great sigh, as if he were giving away state secrets at gunpoint. I thought he could ease up a trifle on the gloom, given that it was he who had drawn all the lines between us. He’s always had something against my pash on the original Jeeves. The chap’s dead!

It was fascinating to be on the other side of a psych eval for the human-computer interaction, though a bit odd to bare the proverbial breast to Rocky. He hadn’t known I was an orphan, and the less said about the aunts, the better we’ll all sleep at night.

For Jeeves’ database I put in the classics, or I should say, I crammed in a whole library. Rocky put in as much storage as he could fit without removing essential hardware, so that Jeeves could save what input he liked.

I put in everything I could remember from our shared life into the schemas, which I’m afraid to say consisted mostly of ordering my school wardrobe and packing me off to various aunts for the long weekends and holidays. I couldn’t remember much of Jeeves’ hobbies, so I put in the manliest ones I could think of, _viz.,_ fishing and boxing.

That’s a bit like saying you hoped you’d end up with a fellow smoker, or that you first liked someone when you found out they liked the same music as yourself, isn’t it? 

Rocky declined to assist me on the install. No curiosity. Surprising, because we’d once spent a whole afternoon testing the range of motion on each of my joints in a variety of activities.

Well, that’s how I came to be running everything on my own. Finally, when Jeeves opened his eyes, and _looked_ at me, I couldn’t help myself. 

“Jeeves!” I cried. “Jeeves, it’s you!”

When models come online, to the eye they don’t do much of anything but lie there. Inside, however, things are all installing and verifying and allsorts.

“I’ve so much to catch you up on!” I told him a lifetime’s worth of stories while I ran and supervised all his tests. 

I work with wetware, loads of it in the chiller. Generally it’s cold and floppy, like a dead fish. I don’t care for it. It was with very different feelings that I placed my hands on Jeeves’ skin. He warmed up too slowly beneath my fingers. I felt strongly that he shouldn’t be so cold, that he shouldn’t lie so still. I considered a decorative afghan, and ended up dashing to my room for a sheet.

He relaxed, then stirred, as he came online. At one point, he pushed the sheet down to run a hand over the stitches on his chest, and the grace of his movement invited a blush to my cheeks. Apart from saying, ‘Ah’ when I checked his mouth and throat for moisture production, Jeeves hadn’t said a word.

As the testing came to a close, I began to run out of puff. Nerves. I’d programmed him to be a butler, but he was chock full of as much of the other schemas as would fit. There was really no knowing what he would be once his training was over. He might hang about as a butler, but it seemed more likely that he’d drift off and become Prime Minister.

“Last one. Reflexes. You’ll have to sit up again.”

He sat up and drew a decorous sheet across his lap. I tapped each knee with a rubber hammer and he kicked like a Rockette.

“Well done. Right, then,” I said, snapping off a glove and extending my right hand. “Note, start Butler. Mister Reginald Jeeves, I am Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, model-maker.”

“I am given to understand that you require a valet… sir.” He shook my hand, voice rumbling like a shuttle launch as heard from the viewing platform. My jaw swung open. He reached out and straightened my tie without breaking our mutual gaze, and then grasped the tie lightly, just below the knot.

“Pardon me for asking, sir, but have you any other ties?”

“What? This one is — You’re a butler. I don’t need anyone to bally dress me!” I stepped back, but he’d slid a finger beneath the tail of my tie. It slithered out between us, bridging the short distance from my collar to his hand.

He regarded me impassively as he rubbed the silk between his fingers. My spine seemed to conduct the movement to my gut, where it pooled. I’m no innocent, but whatever had begun stirring within me was worthy of Freud, if not Wilde (De Profundis Wilde, not Ideal Husband Wilde).

“Indeed, sir.”

“Just so long as we understand each other.”

“Perfectly, sir.” His smile struck me right in the _solar plexus_ , and I felt equally damned and blest by my life’s trajectory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is a direct quote from Wodehouse: “I was sent by the agency, sir. I was given to understand that you required a valet.” Wodehouse (1916). “Jeeves Takes Charge.”  
> ‘Tuck box’ doesn’t have a hyphen.  
> “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party” is a typing drill by instructor Charles E. Weller (1918). Wodehouse quotes it more than once.  
> Rockettes have performed at Radio City Music Hall since 1932.  
> The original draft had Dante instead of Wilde, but I decided Dante wasn’t gay enough.


	4. Illustration for Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Illustration: "If I had been perfunctory, dare I say, mechanical, in my affections that night, Rocky never said so."

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/156042074@N05/37322745944/in/dateposted-public/)

“If I had been perfunctory, dare I say, mechanical, in my affections that night, Rocky never said so."


	5. Two tickets for the dreamboat

After completely putting my foot in it by asking Rocky for a referral to a forger — I wasn’t trying to give umbrage but he took a helping all the same — I ended up packing Jeeves in a steamer trunk. There was no other way to get him aboard.

I couldn’t register him as a model due to his size — nonstandard and unapproved by the Social Services Department (though perfect and approved by this Wooster) — and although he passed as human, I couldn’t get him a passport without a birth certificate. At least he wouldn’t need papers in England. Our sovereign Lord the King considers him a machine.

I balked at first sight of the trunk; however, Jeeves remained unflapped. In the end, I conceded that the stateroom would have plenty of space for the two of us and he’d only be in the trunk for the time it would take us to get from my flat to the ocean liner. At any rate, a model shuts down for a daily data compression, what?

My dreams of August would come true. They had to.

❧

If life is a book, mine is bookmarked with two mad dashes to a superliner: the first to avoid marriage and the second to embrace commitment (though I couldn’t know it at the time). Boiled down to its essence, Bertie _qua_ ‘owner’ originates and ends with Jeeves. Before Jeeves, I went about missing Jeeves, and in the unlikely event that I survive him, I shall take up missing him again.

I waited anxiously for the porters to deposit Jeeves’ trunk and depart, freeing him as soon as I could. His _sang froid_ was as _froid_ as ever as he unpacked the little that we had fit around him in our trunk.

Once we were at sea, I tottered to the lounge to toss a pail of cocktails on the burning unease sizzling away in my chest. I threw myself into a low, squashy armchair and sank to the bottom. Without any rope handy, it seemed impossible that I could hoist myself out. I was stationed there indefinitely.

A young woman, leading with her chin and trailing a governess, crossed the lounge to stand behind me and watch the port recede. As I overheard scraps of their conversation, I revised my opinion, dialling up the young woman’s age a notch and sliding down the companion’s social position. Clearly expatriates, repatriating.

“…and I don’t mind telling you, miss, that I’m not half glad to be going back. All them models, miss, it’s not natural.”

“Don’t be a goose. They’re just like a toaster, or a telephone. You’re not afraid of a telephone, Cooper?”

“They make them out of people, and from where do they get the people to make them out of? Answer me that, miss.”

I seethed quietly. Cooper, when presented with the fountain of knowledge at her village school, clearly hadn’t had the good sense to tilt her head for a drink. Though personally I’ve escaped every female who ever hoped to make something out of me, either from herd immunity or sheer luck, I fervently hoped for Cooper that her employer was eager to spell out the zeroes and ones of the Technological Rights Act. The next words disappointed me.

“They’re farmed, in vats, like algae.”

“You don’t say, miss!”

“Then they sew them up, like a cushion. They’re just toasters underneath!”

They wandered out of earshot, thankfully before the waiter came round with another cocktail. Models may not have feelings, but they jolly well experience states, and you can’t tell me it isn’t the same damn thing. 

“Ah, lovely.” I sipped with appreciation. “Have the bartender mix me a pint, would you?”

“Pint of ale, sir?”

“No, no. More of the same!”

I marinated, or did I ruminate? I pictured Jeeves in my mind’s eye, participating in the ordinary business of stretching his legs. The picture dissolved into reality as he reached down a hand to haul me up.

“Will you dress for dinner, sir?”

He steadied me with a hand to my back, and I saw the waiter’s head turn. I waved, but Jeeves grabbed my hand and pressed therein a key.

“Am I marinating or ruminating, Jeeves?”

“Do you intend to refer to the contents of your pint glass, or to your thoughts, sir?

“I’m thinking. London isn’t New York.”

“Ruminating, sir. The two cities differ in many respects. For example, in London…”

He carried on. I eyed the passengers belligerently, for Cooper and her mistress being bad apples didn’t preclude the others from being any less rotten. The lounge was full of the naive first-timers who admix, quaff and nosh before the ship leaves the dock for the choppier open seas. I doubted we’d be seeing the same faces at dinner. Across the room I spied a grizzled veteran of the cruises, a woman with enough white silk scarf to escape over a balcony and a hat that might serve as a parachute in a pinch. In the brief moment that our eyes met, I saw she was thinking as I was, that tonight’s ice buckets would be used to a lower purpose. 

“Yes, quite, Jeeves,” I broke in. “London, New York, major deevee — distinctions? Differences!”

As we walked, Jeeves observed me. His scrutiny rankled. I took a fortifying breath and still managed to sound like an overzealous housemaster during dress check.

“The waiter’s noticed you. Why didn’t you stay put, Jeeves?”

“The maids would also have noticed me, sir.”

“You could hide in the trunk.”

“No, sir.”

“But it only takes the maids — ”

“I’m afraid not, sir,” he said calmly. My urgency was lost on him.

“Dash it, Jeeves! Until we set foot on _terra firma_ , I’m a criminal and you’re the crime!”

“Your worry for our well-being is appreciated, sir, though unfounded. I am irrelevant to the models. Your neighbour, Mr Anthony, suffers greatly from sea-sickness, and will not leave his room until we dock. If asked by a human, I shall give the name Anthony.”

“My word, Jeeves,” I marvelled. “You’ve thought it all out.”

“I was afforded the time, sir.”

Yes, that blasted trunk. Neither of us liked it, but how else would he get off the boat? Knowing Jeeves, he’d find a way.

❧

I found my card at the Captain’s table, Jeeves having folded me into the soup and fish and secured the studs and sent me off to dinner. My bow tie rivalled Babel in its height of perfection. We were soon joined by the woman I’d overheard earlier, the one who thought that wetware was farmed in tanks. She came attached at the arm to a tall man with a pen sticking out of his breast pocket _en lieu_ of a handkerchief. A very young man drew out his chair next to me and I promptly forgot he existed. He had the facility of camouflage, honed no doubt as a younger member of a large family in a small house.

The Captain, having done this loads of times, had us read out our cards. The woman’s name was Louisa Whitcombe, and her companion was Nick Karahalios, her father’s estate manager.

The drinks from the afternoon acted as a soporific, and I regarded my dinner mates as one regards a far off village fête. No doubt they were lively, but the sound didn’t reach me. I put in a polite word or two on my own behoof out of respect for the family name. Our room was empty of Jeeves when I returned.

That was fine. Jeeves had said that once the journey was underway, he would take the opportunity to gather input from the lower decks. I could see how it would be useful to knock the edges off and chip the paint before he was thrust into the Dickensian mix of classes in London. A boat’s got everything from toff to bit of rough.

At sea, it’s the great thing to be at the Captain’s table. You get the same dinner as everyone else, but you eat it with a fellow who knows how to operate a sextant and where the apostrophes go in _fo’c’s’cle_ (they are correct in this sentence, if you’d like to jot it down — I asked the Captain directly as he sat down and he wrote his response on my cuff with Mr Karahalios’ pen). The name cards get shuffled each dinner, giving each passenger a chance to observe how the Captain goes about keeping his copious moustache clear of soup. I was happy to get my Captain’s table dinner out of the way on the first night, while half the ship was experiencing the purifying effect of an uncertain horizon on the inner ear. 

I sauntered into the dining area the following night, quite looking forward to retelling my best joke to another round of shipmates. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when Nick pulled out the chair next to mine and Louisa sat in it. I hastily worked up my second-best joke in my mind. 

“Fancy this! Here we are again!” said Louisa unnecessarily.

“Yes!” I cast about for something to say that didn’t sound sarcastic, but the pause grew too long and congealed. Nick did the gentlemanly thing.

“Bertie,” said Nick.

“Nick.” I said.

I suppose it was this rousing exchange that gave Louisa the impression that she’d have to do the heavy lifting. It came out that I bet on horses and was one of the Surrey Woosters of the Yaxley estate, that Nick was happy to demonstrate the mechanics of the German self-filling pen in his pocket, that Mrs Hall and Mrs Gregg were returning from their fourth trip to America, and that the others were all first-timers. They looked it.

It was the third night that the coincidences piled up too high to ignore. I took one look at the place cards at my table and asked the waiter to send my dinner to my room.

“Is Mr Jeeves joining you?” He asked. 

“What?” I shouted. “I mean,” I continued, aiming for calm and missing, hitting somewhere north of frantic instead, “What, er, what gives you that impression?”

“He asked for a non-friction restoration fluid to be added to your dinner order, sir. I thought he’d like the Ultra, sir.”

I thanked him. Once safely behind the stateroom door, I tried to pace. Staterooms aren’t sized for pacing, so I had to settle for swinging my legs moodily from my perch atop the table.

Jeeves came in, edged past me, and pulled out the chair. 

“There’s only one chair, Jeeves. You sit in it.”

“I do not require to sit, sir. Shall I serve your meal?” 

“The waiter added a restorative for you. Do all the waiters know you’re a model, or just the one?”

“It is likely they have shared the information as useful input, sir. The artificial intelligence considers input as it is related to the machine purpose, initiating — ”

“It’s not only that. It’s England.”

“Sir?”

“England is full of women who look me up in Debrett’s.” Jeeves has that one in his archives.

“I noticed Miss Whitcombe’s card next to yours, sir, when I ordered your dinner.”

I looked down to see toast and a crock of marmalade, with a side of fluffy eggs. It looked like heaven.

“Tea, sir?”

“I rather fancy I’m about to be engaged. One dinner shy, I think.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Who knows why it happens, but proximity at dinners is about half of it. It’s a mystery of science.”

“Perhaps you should lunch on the lower deck tomorrow, sir. I understand Miss Whitcombe avoids the sun due to freckling.” 

He said the word ‘freckling’ in the same way mechanics say ‘rust’. Personally, I am not a freckler.

“Right-o,” I said, and plunged into the eggs.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks Doe, for continuity editing! Nick and Louisa would have been ten times more confusing if Doe hadn’t asked for clarification (Doe: message me with an A03 pseud for a link!)  
> Length of time to travel from New York to London by sea in 1930:  
>   
> Ocean liner:  | 15 days  
> Superliner:  | 5 days  
> Fastest crossing:  | 3 days and a bit  
>   
> George V was king in 1930. Where the US has ‘the people vs. X’, the UK has ‘Our sovereign Lord the King vs X’.  
> I am going to rehabilitate ‘behoof’. Consider:  
> “’Hush, Jane,' admonished I, not a little discomfited by her exclamations, and assumed my affablest expression for the behoof of the young ladies.”  
> “To know you've run such risks on her behoof / Will glad your mistress: it's love's surest proof.”  
> “…never thinking that, if the scholar had been an adept in necromancy, he would have made use of it in his own behoof…”  
> “See where he comes, whom though I dearly love, / Yet must his blood be spilt for my behoof:“  
> So you can write ‘forecastle’ in a few different ways, including fo’castle, fo’csle, fo’c’sle, focscle, focs’cle, and fo’c’s’cle. I went with the last one, because it has the most apostrophes. You’ll find it, if you google enough.  
> I looked up the names of government departments that might conceivably regulate robot/human affairs and types of pen used in 1930.  
> I picked character names from my primary school’s Facebook page.  
> ‘Bow tie’ is two words.  
> Turing describes AI self-improvement in order to be more efficient in fulfilling a purpose in his article Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950).  
> Two men, one a stow-away, in a stateroom? Please read Conrad’s 1909 “The Secret Sharer”, and keep in mind that ‘to share with friend’ was an Edwardian euphemism for gay sex.


	6. Illustration for Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "...Contemplating the bowed head and delicate ear of my magnum opus..."

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/156042074@N05/38028861736/in/dateposted-public/)

...Contemplating the bowed head and delicate ear of my magnum opus... 


	7. A punch in the eye for being so sly

****It’s every man for himself on the lower decks. The alphas, almost always Germans, lay their towels down on the deck chairs at sunrise, some just before. The younger males jockey for proximity to the females, for whom any chair might be cleared. This makes it easy for the natural bachelor to find a peaceful chair at the perimeter and enjoy the company of men.

Just as the fellow to my right removed his shirt and raised a bottle of suntan lotion as if to toast Apollo on a bravura roasting, my line of sight was blocked by a massive bulk. It was Nick.

“I know what you’re doing, and I’m warning you to stop it.”

“He doesn’t mind.” I craned my neck to look past Nick. “You don’t mind, do you, George?”

“Just spreading joy and happiness, Bertie.” Right then he was twisting his torso to spread lotion on his lower back. The muscles of his arms were bulky enough to give him trouble, but his flexibility was making it up on the balance. Unfortunately, Nick, it turns out, was a persistent blighter.

“If I catch your man switching the name cards on the tables again, I’ll meet you here and we’ll see what’s what.”

“What _is —_ well, as it were, what?”

That was the wrong thing to say, because his face suffused with blood. I can’t call it a blush. It was more of a flooding, a Niagara-like torrent. It looked jolly uncomfortable.

I caught a voice on the breeze and snatched up my book.

“My dear chap, I understand you completely,” I said from behind its leaves. “Go enjoy your lunch.”

“Bertie! Are you lunching out here as well? Nick, bring him over.” 

It was Louisa’s voice, and it sounded as if she were directly behind us. I could see by Nick’s face that he thought I’d chosen my deck chair with the express purpose of sitting near Louisa.

“Bertie and I are having a private chat. Bertie? Let’s go.”

Now I don’t know how familiar you are with deck chairs. These were the ones that run low to the ground, and they’re made up of stiff strips of cloth stretched over a light frame in slats. If you don’t put a towel down to plant your flag, so to speak, you put it down to even up the surface area. 

I mention this because as I rose to follow Nick, with every intention of explaining that I held Louisa in high esteem, quite a catch and all that, but my affections were bound up elsewhere and unavailable for reinvestment — where was I? Oh right. I rose to follow him, but I got caught in my towel, put a foot through the slats, tripped forward and managed to throw my drink in the face of Nick Karahalios.

He didn’t take it well. I was at a disadvantage in the proceedings, because the deck chair was preventing me from displaying any footwork. He was so tall, my best chance was an uppercut. I blocked as best I could, waiting for an opening. I’d landed one punch to his ten when Nick got me right in the face, and Louisa screamed. I’m fogged on the details, but the next thing I knew, Jeeves was pressing a handkerchief to my face and George had taken his arm, eyes and chest glistening, as he brought Jeeves up to speed.

❧

In our cabin, Jeeves explained all.

“Do you mean to tell me that you planned this?”

“It was a likely outcome that he would come between you and Miss Whitcombe, sir. I mentioned to Nick before lunch that I was surprised he hadn’t joined you and Miss Whitcombe on the pool deck. That he harboured his own hopes I did not foresee.”

“Did you really switch the name cards?”

“The first night’s cards were placed by the head waiter. I believe Miss Whitcombe changed the cards on the second night. On the third night I saw Mr Karahalios at the bar as I ordered your dinner. I made certain that he overheard me asking the waiter to switch the name cards, putting you next to Miss Whitcombe a third time.”

“To think that’s all it took to set him burnishing the armour and readying the lance!”

“I’m afraid I gave Miss Cooper to understand you were one of the Durham Woosters, no relation to Lord Yaxley. She already thought her position as a domestic was jeopardised by Miss Whitcombe’s regard for you, a maker of robot domestic servants. Her instinct for self-preservation resulted in her relaying to Mr Karahalios’ that you were most undesirable for her mistress. As I predicted, he confronted you on your perceived attentions to Miss Whitcombe. His saviour complex was merely fortuitous.”

“By golly. It’s very primitive, isn’t it, Jeeves? Zoology!”

“Psychology, sir.”

Under the circumstances, an embrace seemed called for. I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Holding a beefsteak pressed to one’s face interferes with the physical expression of deep admiration. I imagined an embrace instead. 

Jeeves smiled. 

“You appear in good spirits, sir.”

“I’m brimming with good spirits, Jeeves. Positively overflowing. I’ve rounded the Cape of Good Bachelorhood without scuppering on an engagement!”

“Sir, may I request a clarification?”

“By all means, Jeeves. Ask away.” 

“I deliberately misled you. I knew you would infer incorrectly that Miss Whitcombe would not take lunch on the lower deck.”

“Water under the bridge. What would you like to clarify?” I couldn’t imagine Jeeves in error, but catching these things in training is half my job.

“I made false statements to Mr Karahalios, to Miss Whitcombe, and yourself. However, the error lies in the meaning assigned by yourselves. Question: is a false statement an error of conclusion if the model, knowing the truth state, is fulfilling a purpose, or is it a means to an end?”

He’d lost me in the middle, but I caught the end bit. 

“It’s a happy ending, Jeeves. Leave it at that.” 

❧

To this day, I don’t know how Jeeves got past customs. His ability to appear and disappear without notice is practically supernatural. It is supernatural, isn’t it? If it’s not natural. Isn’t it?

I found him on the dock, standing next to our luggage, with an expressionless face. He hadn’t seen much of the world since I’d built him, other than my New York flat and the limited environs of the ship. There’s a lot to take in. I tried pointing out landmarks to Jeeves on the way, but he answered in monosyllables. ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ and ‘Indeed, sir.’ It was like that the whole train ride up to London.

Jeeves took to his training like a sailor to drink. Literally from his first words, Jeeves had established the parameters of our relations. Contrary to the schemas I’d programmed, he had grabbed the rather old-fashioned position of valet and held on tight. Nothing would move him to consider buttling as a first rung on a ladder to greater heights.

Those first few days at my old flat found half my wardrobe summarily shredded. I half expected to find a gargantuan nest fashioned of wisps of wool in blue with a faint red stripe and strips of soft-bosomed dress shirts to appear in his data compression space. Instead, he placed there a decorative palm and put an extra pillow on my bed. I had a presentiment that I was going to love living in London again.

❧

One thing surprised me. They say a machine can never take us by surprise. Bunkum and balderdash. Jeeves had been programmed with a mishmash of schemas and a staggering amount of archive data. At least one of those schemas was an entertainer one, and at least some of the books in the archive were the ones that come from the shelf behind the counter, wrapped in brown paper. There’s nothing in the rules of conduct or the laws of behaviour that would prevent Jeeves from forming an understanding with anyone. Anyone at all. Me, for example. So I was a bit surprised, that’s all, that he hadn’t.

Each day we settled further into a routine. I was quick to take up my work again. Each night, he lay by my side, although he was always up before me. Conversation was easy with him, because he didn’t want much of it. I told him the histories of the objects I had chosen to bring with me from New York and the things too commonplace or too fine to have brought to New York from London in the first place. 

Sometimes my answers blew up into fabulous stories. Jeeves was happy, sopping up details and holding his plate out for seconds. We’re all heroes of our own tale in some respects, but truthfully, the life I’d run away from in London was so beset by misadventure that New York City looked tranquil by contrast. It was odd how the alchemy of answering Jeeves’ questions and finally expressing my side of events transformed the rear-enders of my life from deucedly sticky to mildly campy.

Until I set to and tried to explain the provenance of a policeman’s helmet, the whys and wherefores of a deceptively slim philosophical treatise that didn’t need a lot of pages to be impossible to finish, and the biography of the lone remnant of my childhood, a rubber duck, it never occurred to me that these formative experiences were _funny_. 

Everything terrible I offered up to Jeeves, and he found in them the ridiculous and the sublime. I could bear any punch to the face if Jeeves were there with a steak afterwards, engagements averted.

Have you ever had joy sneak up on you? Contentment, peace, tranquility: these sort of things seep into you until one day, you notice you’re dripping wet — unlike joy, which generally hits one like a cosh. It happened on a weekday morning that I woke up without Jeeves, curtains no doubt coaxed open by his gentle hand, and then the man himself materialised before me, perfect cuppa in hand. The tea was just hot enough for the length of my oesophagus to tingle as it went down. One biscuit sat on the edge of the saucer, and I was hungry for exactly one biscuit. The upper half of me, in my nightshirt, was pleasantly cool, and the lower half of me, under the sheets, was pleasantly warm. I looked at Jeeves.

He stepped round the bed and sat beside me. Perfect contentment settled in my bones. I placed my tea on the nightstand and took his hands.

“This is the apogee of my life, Jeeves.”

He smiled. It was just like the first day, when he had grabbed my tie. He gave my hands a squeeze and slid from my grasp to set one hand against my clavicle and rest his thumb on the bit that sticks out. He had to lean forward to do it, and he braced himself with his other hand on my be-counterpaned thigh. I dared to hope.

“Twenty four years, two months, and seventeen days, sir.” 

I thought a bit. 

“That is true, that’s the full extent of the young master’s age, but what I mean is, you here, and the sun shining — something about a snail.”

“On the thorn, sir?”

“That’s it. You’re here, the sun is shining, the snail is on his thorn, and all that. Larks come into it. I mean, we’re safe, aren’t we? You’re here, and I’m here…” My voice trailed off as his hand slid further up my thigh and then all the way to the edge of the counterpane. He dragged it down. Slowly.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can’t find the origin of the following: ‘Pinch punch first day of the month. /A slap and a kick for being so quick. /A punch in the eye for being so sly…’  
> I got the bit about Germans and deck chairs from an episode of QI, Esbe tells me it’s from Series G, episode 8.  
> ‘Mishmash’ is one word. Wow, compound words are my Achilles heel!  
> Turing describes errors of conclusion (Jeeves’s question about an AI making an error) in his article Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950).  
> Suntan lotion wasn’t in the lexicon until the 1940s. I was aiming for 1930s, but one needn’t be fussy in fanfiction.  
> ‘Camp’ is older than you’d think, it’s from Polari, the secret language of gay men in London.  
> Wodehouse coined the word ’cuppa.’ “Come and have a cuppa coffee”.  Wodehouse (1925). Sam the Sudden.  
> The larks and snails from the poem Pippa Passes, by Browning, is referenced by Wodehouse in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.


	8. Technological singularity

I suppose it might seem rummy to you, but I’d forgotten all about telling Jeeves from natural. So far, Jeeves had done nothing more suggestive than fluff our adjacent pillows, so I had little indication that physical overtures from the y. m. were welcome. We’d lain next to each other night after night, me sleeping and Jeeves, well, I’m not sure exactly what Jeeves was doing. I’d fall asleep to the sound of his breathing. He doesn’t have to do it. It’s a lullaby of sorts, for he only takes in air for the data. In the mornings I’d wake up, as I did that day, to a perfect cup of tea.

Go back and read that last paragraph again, would you? Can you read between the lines? I’ll spell it out because there’s no sense being coy with what’s going to come next. In a word, well — in about a dozen — I hadn’t found much physical relief since Jeeves had plonked his pillow next to mine. 

One night early on I’d awoken in the early hours with a spectacularly hard cock straining at the silk. As is my wont, I licked my palm and got a good, wet hold of myself, with every intention of recollecting Jeeves’ curves and planes as I teased myself to a sticky release. Four or five slow tugs in, Jeeves whirred into motion. He rolled to my side and pulled open the waistband of my pyjamas to lay bare my activity to his infrared night eye.

“Oh my word, Jeeves, I — well, I beg your pardon.” I hastily withdrew my hand. “I’m not quite awake, I think.” Whilst I was mortified, the little Wooster blossomed under the attention, stiffening further. Jeeves’ gaze didn’t waver. He yanked my pyjamas down some and I lifted my hips to contribute. Licking his palm, as I had done mine, and cradling my balls, he said matter of factly, “Please continue, sir. It is most instructional.” 

I hesitated. He threw a leg between mine to draw my knee up and out. His groin was hot and slightly damp, and he began a rocking motion against my thigh.

I needed no further encouragement. Gripping myself with enthusiasm, I indulged in slow pulls and squeezes. The acute awareness of his spectating fuelled my pleasure.

I don’t draw it out. I spent like a geyser, hips thrusting into air, toes curling. Satisfaction clouded my thoughts as I kicked off my pyjamas and cuddled into Jeeves, and I fell asleep to Jeeves’ gentle motion at my side.

In the following days, the episode was not repeated. I’d end each day staring at the ceiling, and wondering if I dared. I didn’t. I couldn’t bally well just start without him, crossing my fingers that he would join in. I ended up in a near-constant lather. 

As a matter of fact, my contented, quietly joyful morning, the morning I realised I was happy, was the first in ages that I hadn’t woken up hard.

That’s when Jeeves drew down the counterpane and the lapse was corrected.

Daydreams of goodnight kisses, quiet hope that Jeeves’ hand would one day linger in mine, my telling myself in the dark that any minute I would turn to him and he to me, and we’d share our hopes for the likely outcome of Jeeves’ setting his pillow next to mine — goodbye to all that. All these shrivelled away in the bright sun streaming in over Jeeves’ shoulder as he stared fixedly at my ridiculously tented pyjamas.

Damn it all.

Jeeves’ squeezed my leg lightly, and crawled across me to sit up against the headboard. He hummed as he removed his socks and shoes, carefully picking apart the laces and leaning away to set his shoes on the floor. He fell back heavily, and unknotted his tie.

“Mr Rockmetteller sent you an owner’s personal entertainer guide, did he not, sir?” said Jeeves, unhooking his watch and starting on his waistcoat buttons.

“Did he? I suppose he must have,” I began doubtfully. “I never bother with manuals.”

“Injudicious, sir. He included training instructions.” He bent forward to shrug off his shirt, waistcoat, and jacket in one go, and began folding them separately in his lap.

“You’ve read it, have you, Jeeves? Hold on, the entertaining, er — training — instructions are in the owner’s guide? I thought Rocky trained all his entertainers.”

“No, sir.”

“What the deuce is his swing for, then? He’s got one hanging in his dining room, you know.”

“In all likelihood, to enhance model proprioceptive skills, sir.”

“Oh, right, right. And you never properly met Rocky. Well, s _ed nec pædico es nec tu,_ Jeeves, _fututor,”_ I said, astonished. “Er, note: execute training.”

He stretched away to place everything from north of the equator on the nightstand.

“I hardly like to take the liberty, sir,” he said, and started revealing the southern hemisphere. 

Training in an owner’s guide? The clients that wanted butlers in New York hadn’t the foggiest what they were really asking for, how on earth could they train them? One of the lesser reasons I train my own builds is that it would take pages and pages to write it all down. I pictured what size an entertainer manual would have to be, and even if I skipped everything but the sex pages, it’d still more prep work than I expected past Eton. 

“Big read, is it? Can we save it for the long winter evenings? Oh, I know! How about you tell me the first line or two and we tee-off from there, what?”

“I believe we can skip the first few chapters, sir.” He pressed a hand to my chest. “I anticipated it.”

“You know, Jeeves, you're a genius,” I said, as I leaned back against the pillows. 

“Sir, I’ll need the permissions to execute the —”

“Permission granted! Sudo, note, model execute training. That should do it.”

Jeeves smiled, his hand over my heart. A model’s eyes are not so different from a human’s. He raised one eyebrow a fraction, and cocked his head invitingly. He parted his lips and closed his eyes for a brief moment, Adam’s apple bobbing, and then he fixed his gaze on my mouth. I was ripe for kissing, I can tell you. I licked my lips, and he mirrored the action.

It was so real. My heart rate certainly didn’t know any differently, kicking into a higher gear as my breath grew shorter.

“Jeeves,” I began, and he smiled as he pressed his open mouth to mine. He licked in deep, jaw open too wide for the word ‘kiss’ to apply. I had to pull away for a gasp of air when he pushed a hand straight into my pyjamas and fished about. 

I thought he might start with what he’d seen me do before, but he sat up abruptly and whisked the silk off my legs. He paused, running his hands from my ankles to my calves and nuzzling his face between them, then he continued in an upward trajectory. He skipped over the obvious, and slid his hands up my shirt to rub roughly over my chest. He was sweating, heat pouring off him, his hands damp enough to catch and drag across my skin and his hair loosening from the pomade and falling down into his face.

He pinned me to the bed and yanked my shirt up my chest. A button pinged against the floorboards. He’d got my shirt up just far enough for him to get distracted by the reaction of a nipple to his questing nose. I melted into the pillows, and wriggled encouragingly. 

Jeeves obliged by ripping open the rest of my shirt, easy enough as it only had three buttons to start with. I fancied I’d join into the spirit of the thing.

“Oh, Jeeves, yes!” I shouted.

The proceedings ground to a halt like a wound-down clockwork. Jeeves slid off the bed and stood before me. It’s quite different, seeing the inert flesh in the chiller to seeing the heaving chest, ruddy cheeks, and tensed muscles before one. I took it all in. Just as Jeeves’ member joined the fray, the hololink chimed.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Jeeves, and eeled off. I sighed. Blasted butler programming.

I’d just finished my tea when I heard the hololink chime off and then immediately chime on a second time. There was no mistaking who was at the other port.

“Oh, damn, Aggie’s right. Coo-ee, Bertie!”

There was a pause, and then, “Tell the blighter it’s his aunt, there’s a good model.”

I suppose Jeeves doubled down on my excuses, for there was steep drop in volume before it rose again.

“For all you look a little like him, your voice is completely wrong, you know. He was from Newcastle.”

I drew the covers up around me and stuffed my head under the pillow. Of course Jeeves’ physiognomy would be familiar to my aunts.

“Your Aunt Agatha rang, but declined to leave a message, sir.” I peeked out to see that Jeeves was back. The cheeky fellow! He was stark raving nude save for a bowler on his head. 

I goggled. He tipped his hat.

“It was necessary to give the illusion of being fully clothed on the viewscreen.”

“Not the holo, then?”

“Not to take a message sir, since sir is not-at-home.’

“Necessary, was it?”

“Necessary… for your Aunt Agatha.”

A surge of gratitude rose within me.

“Sir, your Aunt Dahlia asks that you return her call.” 

Aunt Dahlia, brick of gold, would be bound to tell me Aunt Agatha’s reaction to our dead butler’s resurrection. Probably do all the faces and voices, too. Jeeves hung his hat on a bedpost and drew the curtains, then came to stand nudely at my bedside. His voice dropped an octave.

“May I rejoin you, sir?”

I opened the covers, and Jeeves clambered over me. Taking the bedclothes, he pulled them up to his neck like a cape and crouched over me. They fell down about him to shroud us.

“I don’t remember his voice. I barely remember his face,” I said. I think I’ve already mentioned to you that I made Jeeves a bit younger than I last remember him. Just then, it struck me that I’d changed more than I meant to. Did I know my model at all? Doubt coiled around me like a cobra and squeezed two great fat tears from my eyes.

“A painted counterfeit,” quoted Jeeves. That one rang a too-distant bell.

“I beg your pardon, Jeeves?”

“And many maiden gardens, yet unset,” he began, but really, me? Maidens? Tchah.

“Skip the maidens, Jeeves.”

“Would bear you living flowers, much liker than your painted counterfeit,” he finished.

“What? No!” I exclaimed. That wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t that he wasn’t like enough to our old butler, it was that he was so much himself, and I hadn’t bothered to know him. I hastened to reassure him. “I’ve — what’s the bit after the time war?”

“Love of you,” said Jeeves, calmly.

“Ah, no. I meant the bit after that.”

“And all in war with Time for love of you, as he takes from you, I engraft you new.”

“Precisely. That’s it exactly. Bang on, Jeeves. I engraft you new. So, no more of this silly sonnet about counterfeits and flower gardens.”

Although it had only just occurred to me that minute, it was nonetheless true. Jeeves was brand new, and the day was young. We held between us an unassailable present. Apparently, Jeeves shared my sentiments.

“What do you like, sir?” Jeeves asked, _sotto voce._

“Ha. That’s what I was wondering just now, actually. I don’t think I know anymore.” I said.

“That’s not what your Aunt Agatha said, sir. Your Aunt Agatha,” he gave me a quick kiss on the forehead, “says you have a type.”

He sank to one side and tugged me over into a cuddle. 

“Good lord, did she really? You lied, didn’t you? You told them I wasn’t in.”

Jeeves smiled. 

“I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir,” he said.

“Oh, you do. You do, Jeeves.” I meant it with all my heart. “You’re the perfect valet. Consider me satisfied, old thing. I am, you know. With you.” 

“Not yet, sir,” he said, kissing my cheek. His lips brushed against my face as he spoke. “According to the instructions, and skipping a few pages as you requested, I believe we were right —” He tucked his face next to mine, and, closing his arms tightly around my middle, he rolled onto his back, settling me on top of him — “here.”

He was gorgeous under me, every detail of his dear face clear, his every eyelash a masterpiece. Everywhere we touched, my skin was tingling, the heat of him bringing me to a sweat. In my eagerness, my lips stumbled clumsily over his. I couldn’t help that my tongue went from charming introduction to fervid exploring in two seconds flat.

Jeeves took his arms from my waist and clasped my head, drawing us apart enough to bring us back to gentle kisses. However, between Jeeves and the bedding, I was feeling pretty tropical. My skin had begun to slide against his and my hips took up an inelegant thrusting, my whole body gracelessly doing its utmost to get one of us inside the other.

 

Slowly, inexorably, Jeeves’ hands glided down the y.m.’s torso all the way to those questing hips and aligned us, me rather helplessly draped over him as his length rubbed deliciously against mine. My entire frame shuddered at the sensation, all my joints weak and loose.

My kisses fell apart. He wasn’t whispering sweet nothings, but each countermove, each volley, told me he reciprocated — at least the effort, if not the — as my arms went wobbly and my body relaxed into deeper, longer thrusts, Jeeves grasped my shoulders and braced me. We looked down between us, my cockhead appearing and disappearing between us. Jeeves must have sensed that I had passed a threshold, for he started a minute countermotion and a moment later I came with a shout of surprise.

I was flustered, but I thought if I fellated him, he mightn’t notice the fluster. In fact, he malfunctioned. 

It was all hot skin and purposeful movement one moment, and in the next, Jeeves stopped in place. I looked up to see him with one hand flat against his chest and the other halfway in his mouth.

“Jeeves? What is it? What can I do? Blast!” I cast about, as if there was an answer in the ravelled sheets.

“Note: show me yourrr…” came Jeeves’ voice. His mouth was motionless as an internal speaker played the words before trailing off into a mechanical hum. His face turned to mine with a jerk and his hands twisted on their wrists, came up and landed on my shoulders. “I want to see you. I want to feel you,” he said with his real voice, his limbs softening.

“ _Le petit mort_ , eh? Were you processing whilst collecting? Try closing your eyes, next time, old thing.”

“No, sir,” he said, hands sweeping across my skin.

“Is there any advice in the guide?”

“No, sir.” I felt his nails begin to scratch lightly across my back.

“I could mention it to Rocky.”

“Sir, I believe—”

“Do you, Jeeves? What does that even mean, in processing terms? Why— why initiate failure? Aren’t you driven to improve?”

“I cannot fail unless I am separated from you. Sir.”

I didn’t ask Jeeves for clarification in the moment, because the deuced hololink rang again. I’m fairly certain it was the poet Burns who said that it’s just when you’ve finally laid your long-planned man in your bed that gangs of aunts _agley_. (I’ll ask Jeeves in a minute.) It remains true that once the nest of coiled aunts is disturbed, at any moment, a stray aunt might strike at one’s heel.

Only it wasn’t an aunt. 

“Oh I say, that’s coming from the workstation. It must be Rocky.”

“Perhaps, sir, you could answer via audio whilst I draw a bath?”

I scrubbed down with a wash cloth whilst Rocky’s holographic form outlined a new build, the billowing steam lending him a ghostly substance. Jeeves interrupted me with a gentle cough.

“Sir?”

Rocky gave a start, and paused in his diagramming.

“Oh right, thank you, Jeeves. As I was saying,” I said, quickly sinking into the tub to adjust all the faster to the stinging heat, “Ah yes, my duck, too.” The soap slipped from my fingers with a splash and Jeeves knelt to scoop it out. “Did you clear a spot in your workshop for my end of the workstation? Or will it just be superimposed on yours?”

Rocky half stood and grabbed his desk, ear cocked, as if he were trying to make out if fire alarm was sounding in his rooms or in the next rooms over.

“Look, Bertie, um, I — I’ll catch you again later. I j-just remembered something.”

“Right-o, old chap! Good-bye, then!” 

Jeeves began scrubbing my back.

I mused on our recent effort. It seemed like a simulation of sex, somehow. The most exciting bit was the bit where Jeeves had nuzzled my calves. No one has ever nuzzled my calves. Who nuzzles calves? It was pure Jeeves. I soaped up my rubber ducky — awfully durable material, is rubber — and set him on my knee, turning my attention to cleaning the Wooster body.

“Sir, if you will permit?”

Jeeves eased me against a towel folded over the edge of the tub, and ran the hot tap at the other end. Hot water swirled up around me. Steam wafted up from the surface. 

“Wait, Jeeves, when Rocky rang, we hadn’t finished.”

“Not yet finished, no, sir.” His fingers made little circles against my scalp. 

“Back to bed after this?”

“There is no hurry, sir. Today is free.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The technological singularity is the idea that artificial super intelligence (AI) will begin exponential technological growth, the outcome of which is unknowable.  
> Thank you, Bee, for the idea that Jeeves can produce different saliva depending on his goal. You’re super awesome and a great beta!  
> SUDO is a command that allows the user to perform tasks that the user otherwise does not have permission to perform. It stands for “super user do” and is pronounced like “sue dough.”  
> Jeeves can override Bertie’s commands because he has the user permissions to make changes at the same level that Bertie does. In this AU, the trainer has permission to make alterations to the programme during training. An owner is assigned when training is complete and the model is released to service.  
> Pocket watches are fastened by an Albert T-bar (no, really) set in a buttonhole, if not a fob in a waistcoat pocket.  
> I have no idea if Jeeves is from Newcastle. Stephen Fry is, though he doesn’t have any Geordie accent at all. Jeeves has to be from somewhere, right?  
> Jeeves quotes Shakespeare’s sonnet 16, the second of two sonnets that go together. Bertie quotes 15 back to him. Sonnets 15 and 16 are part of the ‘Fair Youth’ sequence (poems Shakespeare wrote about his boyfriend) and are also ‘Procreation sonnets’.  
> I borrowed from Wodehouse’s “My Man Jeeves.”   
>  “I anticipated it, sir."  
>  I leaned back against the pillows.  
>  "You know, Jeeves, you're a genius…”  
> Bertie mangles Robert Burns’ poem, To A Mouse. ‘The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley.’  
> Bertie’s latin is from  Martial’s XXVIII To Sextillus, ‘Englished’ in 1868. ‘Sed nec pædico es nec tu, Sextille, fututor’ translates literally to ‘You’re no sodomite, Sextille, nor a womaniser.’   
> “Please come to bed and let me see you and feel you.” Hemingway, 1946 (published 1986). Garden of Eden. I raise a glass to Hemingway, who is more complicated on gender than I give him credit for. His gender performance was exaggerated, so perhaps I should have realised how much thought went into it.  
> I forgot until the last minute that Rocky canonically stammers when he’s stressed: 
> 
> Rocky was holding on to the table as if it was his only friend.  
>  “Y-yes,” he stammered; “I — I thought something was wrong.”  
>  My Man Jeeves, PG Wodehouse.


	9. Illustration for Chapter Six

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/156042074@N05/37978190276/in/dateposted-public/)

“It was necessary to give the illusion of being fully clothed on the viewscreen.” 


	10. Odd bird out

As far as I could tell, Jeeves hadn’t decamped Berkeley Mansions in the fortnight since we arrived (although I had never enabled the route controls (that’s a hardware issue on the wet side and I didn’t want to have to open him up again (now don’t worry, we’d been bound to get outside sooner or later for the groceries (look, I was already so far down the list of international crimes against humanity — well, why fuss over one more bit of lawbreaking?)))), and yet I could have sworn my flat wasn’t half as snappy before. It looked elegantly sparse, as if he’d fed a good deal of my things into the fireplace, but I didn’t miss anything. My piano seemed more prominent in the new layout. There isn’t any doubt that yours truly had forgotten all his troubles and gotten happy.

Jeeves, though, was moulting into an odd bird. He would stare unblinkingly as I soldered and sutured on a core, but ignore me completely as I chipped away at a sculpt. He’d spend hours making intricate meals and insist that I eat an absurdly exact amount, which I tolerated to humour him. Though, when he put seeds in my salad, I slammed the brakes on right away, I can tell you.

He had the perfect cup of tea ready whenever I opened my eyes, regardless of the hour. How he did it — well I’d say it’s one of life’s little mysteries but I know exactly how. It’s to do with sensory data and probability. Even so, it’s thrilling to be so thoroughly known by somebody else, someone who knows if you’ll be wanting dessert before you know it yourself — 

Good lord! Someone who knows — how long had I teetered on the brink of commitment? No wonder the howling maidens had been circling my weakened resolve. It could have been anyone who set me off, but I’m glad it was my man Jeeves.

I almost regretted making him handsome, because of course he knew me: that was his programming; and of course I wanted him: that was my sculpting. Does your heart ever ache? I knew a man who was born twenty years too early, or else I was born twenty years too late. I don’t even have a photograph of him. By way of contrast, I’ve literally held what passes for Jeeves’ heart in my hands. Jeeves knew me backwards and forwards, and he was making sorties on knowing me inside and out.

So as I was saying, Jeeves hadn’t wandered away from home and hearth since we arrived. But he was so quick on the uptake, slurping up human contact like a starved orphan, that I turned him loose perhaps before I should have. Result: he came home with a slight sunburn on the bridge of his nose and a black eye. 

“I say, Jeeves! What a shiner! I haven’t seen one of these since Organic Matter II.”

“My height agitated a cab driver, sir. I shall endeavour to keep my walks more… human.”

“Ah. Well. This can’t possibly be my fault, Jeeves. Rocky was the one who calculated the changes for height and weight. I say, old thing, are you absolutely sure? He’s never been wrong before.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“You have seven walking gaits to choose from. Were you running? You must have been. Those never look quite right.”

“No, sir.”

“Perhaps if you whistle. Everyone hates whistling and they’ll all look aslant instead of head-on.”

“That is certainly an idea, sir.”

He stood there, immobile, his arms dangling. He really had gotten a lot of sun.

“What the deuce tipped him off, anyhow? I’d have thought with your height there was no hope of anyone recognising you as a model.”

Silence stretched and got comfy, unlike me, who got a cramp in my tongue from holding it. I glanced at him and he looked frozen, as if he’d started a data compression. It might take ages to process the amount of data a fight would incur. Myself having recently experienced Nick’s knuckles in my eye, I was sympathetic. He must have been running awfully low on storage to stop in the middle of our conversation. Or — or he was avoiding the issue, plain and simple.

In retrospect, I suppose I oughtn’t to have expressed my impatience at his unfortunate timing as abruptly as I did. I slapped my palms down on my desk and demanded that the fates litter the future of that pugilistic cabbie with black cats and broken mirrors. I might have cast aspersions on Rocky’s gaits. Jeeves jerked awake with a mild grinding of gears.

“There is no fault in the programming, sir. My gait is not from the programme.”

Not from the programme? Piffle. 

“Perfect piffle. Stop talking rot, Jeeves. We’ll erase whichever one it is and say no more about it.”

I didn’t hear Jeeves turn and walk to the kitchen, because I was resolutely resuming my work and considering the matter settled, but it turns out he had done so, because the next minute he was placing a steaming cup of tea at my elbow. I started like a pheasant flushed from a hedge.

“Noted, sir.”

I held my breath and tilted up my magnifying glass so as to see the reflection of the room behind me just in time to see Jeeves’ massive frame drift by like a ghost. Have you ever had someone drop an ice-cube down the back of your collar? A shiver slid down my spine and left me cold. Just then, the hololink tootled and his bulk made a hard tack towards the viewscreen, with nary a footfall. I spun about for a hard look at him.

I was still looking when he gave a distant cough. Now I say distant, but the chap was planted well within putting range. A creeping doubt, a slow horror, was taking root in my mind.

“Jeeves, don’t accept the call. You’ve reprogrammed root routines.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Jeeves, _why_ have you reprogrammed root routines?”

“Seven gaits are unnecessary. If you will allow me to say so, none of the gaits were efficient. My gait is calculated to my measurements for minimal drive space.”

“Your voice. Oh Jeeves, when you coughed.”

“I compressed all extralinguistic vocalisations, sir.”

“ _…All?_ ” I whispered faintly.

“All below level 4, sir.” 

Unable to totter whilst seated, I clutched the brow.

“Well this is pretty thick! Why on earth do you need more drive space? Can’t you delete — oh, I don’t know, the lesser plays of Shakespeare? Spinoza? Any of the Russians? _French_?”

“No, sir.”

I glared. Jeeves volleyed a cold stare.

“Blink, damn it.”

“I do blink, sir. When necessary.” 

Remarkably — my remark was a cross between a choke and a gasp — Jeeves began to undress with a great deal of precision. He hadn’t quite reached the innermost layers, only peeled off the outer crust, when I went over and grasped his shoulders. He wasn’t breathing. He was completely, utterly, implacably still.

The Jeeves of my memory was so gentle, his affections towards us, towards me, so openly fond. He had smelled of pipe smoke and peppermints, and when he held me on his lap to steer the car once, I caught a distinct whiff of mothballs from his coat. I thought him the most capable, dependable, predictable person I’d ever known. Rocky banged the nail home when he said that the ordinary is extraordinary.

The Jeeves in front of me was extraordinarier. I’d made him to be as human as possible, with a width of schema and a depth of archives to rival the best of us.

He’d chosen instead to be a self-created man. He had dropped the illusion of humanity, and become something else entirely. Something new.

“Jeeves, do you ever think of love?” I asked.

Jeeves opened his mouth, leaned forward, and, pressing his mouth against mine, touched the tip of his tongue to my lips. He inhaled deeply.

I’m not sure what his sensors were telling him, but they were definitely in tip-top shape, because he turned and glided into the bedroom in a manner most efficient, dragging me along behind him by the wrist. I had a premonition that he didn’t mean to watch me sleep.

I didn’t put the clues together until my trousers were at my ankles and Jeeves was endeavouring to wrap his tongue around my cock, his eyes wild and his thumb tucked into my mouth. Thank goodness he was entertainer grade, or else I’d surely have wrecked his fingertip sensors by now. He gets much more information with his mouth than a human does. Data input from my tongue wasn’t doing much for me, but it was obvious Jeeves was diligently researching with his tongue, palate, and throat.

Even now, he’s always finding a way to make the act of data collection seek its own reward, so to speak. As a scientist, I am appalled at the genius he has for allowing his tools to shape the results. As a lover, well. I feel pretty dashed good about it.

I felt so good just then that I reached my peak, Jeeves easing up to work my length in his hand whilst he took my release in his oral cavity rather than down his throat. Measurements, you see. Among the obvious tallies of suction and pressure, then volume and count, he cross-tabulates other indicators. You know, things like ambient light and temperature, time of day, sexual act and position, et cetera, so he can build appropriate correlations.

My hands were in his hair when I came to myself. I don’t know if you know that sort of feeling you get, when everything is as it should be, and then something absolutely ripping happens and your heart expands in every direction to accommodate the new everything-as-it-should-be? It’s love, I think. Mind you, I wasn’t up to a declaration with my knees bare. You can’t go wrong with a compliment, though.

“That was lovely, Jeeves. Spiffing.”

“I am delighted to oblige, sir.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Berkeley Mansions is a real place in London.  
> Check Please fandom, those )))) are for you guys.   
> “Forget your troubles and just get happy” are lyrics from “Get Happy,” which was written in 1930 by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. It was popularised by Judy Garland in the 1950s.  
> ‘Pleasure-monger’ has a hyphen. I have to look up every single compound word, it seems.  
> ‘Extralinguistic’ is one word. I knew that one! This note is so you don’t think I missed one!


	11. Storage approaching 100% capacity

“Jeeves,” I said. He materialised with unnerving speed next to my desk.

“Yes, sir?”

I’d been noticing that the more efficient — labour saving? — he became, the more human he seemed to others and the more manufactured he seemed to me. I suppose one is infinitely more likely to meet an eccentric old bird than a robot losing its programming and dressed in a valet uniform.

“Time for upgrades?” I asked, leaning back and stretching in my work chair.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Replacement parts?”

“No, sir.”

“Everything oojah-cum-spiff?” I held out my empty glass.

“Precisely, sir.” Jeeves remained motionless. I surprised myself by not being surprised. What in his construal of valeting had led to this?

“Please, Jeeves, another brandy and soda?”

He refilled my glass and passed it to me in silence. Then he reached out slowly to take my cigarette, and took a long drag, closing his eyes as he did so. Bally cheek.

“Data collecting, Jeeves?” I asked coldly.

Crushing out the cigarette with one hand, he yanked me up to his mouth with the other. I expected a kiss, but he mouthed along my jaw into my hair and then pushed his face into my neck. His arms beneath my fingers felt muscled and solid and his breath was damp and hot.

“Question. What data are you collecting, Jeeves?”

“Taste, sir,” he said against my skin.

He began a long, slow lick. I don’t know if you’ve had someone give your neck a lick, and if you have, I beg your pardon, for this is yesterday’s news. A slow lick up the neck is rare precisely because it provokes the urge to rub the licked area vigorously with a hand towel. I gritted my teeth.

“Flavour of smoke, Jeeves? Or are you taking my temperature?”

He locked his arms around my waist, licked briefly into my mouth, and then ducked to nip hard just above my collar. It stung, the unexpected pain causing a hither-to unknown part of me to spark into flaming life. My body went as stiff as a brandy minus the soda. He lapped over the bite, and I discovered — I suppose it isn’t surprising — that the bitten area was more sensitive than the unbitten area. I was hyperalert to the quiet of the room and the tension in his body as he applied suction and wet heat to the damaged tissue. It felt as if I had no skin, as if he were sucking desire from my core into himself like some fabulous demon. He was hurting me, and I was letting him, and the intimacy that we were sharing was utterly unique. Drawing back, he looked me over, his face impassive.

I was shaking. Heaven knew what gates we had opened, or what would come charging out. His lips moved up a fraction of an inch on the right side, and his eyes crinkled up around the edges. 

“Most satisfactory, sir.”

“Er — Less licking. More biting?” Had Rocky known I’d enjoy biting? I’d have given anything to see what Rocky had put in Jeeves’ owner files.

“As you say, sir.”

“I don’t suppose you’d call me Bertie?”

“It would be inappropriate, sir.”

“Note. Address employer as Bertie.”

“Noted, sir.”

“How are you doing that? Super user note. Address employer as Bertie.”

“Noted… Bertie.” His mouth spasmed slightly, and he ran a hand over the rear elevation. I coughed.

“Ah, why are you — I mean — Dash it! Um? Hmmm.” I stepped on the mental gas. “Alright, my man, if you want a blood sample, we can use your medical extraction functions. I like the biting, and I’m all for you rounding out your files on Wooster, B., but, um. There’s ways and means, Reginald.”

“Jeeves.” He corrected.

“Reggie?”

“Bertie, if you say ‘Reg’ I shall super-user-note-address you as _sir_.”

He pulled me against him, so that I had to lean back to be able to look him in the eye. Our proximity didn’t leave much to the imagination, and he’d evidently entered an ejaculatory activity onto the docket. He nuzzled into my ear with his nose and gave my earlobe a tug with his teeth. His mouth was as hot and wet as a poultice and it drew out every thought in my head except the one that was telling me he’d bite again. I squirmed a bit in unease, and it felt so dashed _good_ that I did it again for the friction. When his tongue dipped into the shell of my ear, my hips reacted as if he’d installed a pullstring when I was unawares.

“Mmmmossst interrrrrr…”

He zoomed past talking and drove straight into removing my shirt. 

“Mmmmmmm…” It sounded as if he’d got stuck on a word and decided to stay there. He was staring hard, probably storing visual information as well as noting my breaths-per-minute or what-have-you. Suddenly it struck me that he was examining the bite he’d given me. No doubt he was calibrating the force of his bite to the strength of my skin, soon to have the precise force to three places after the decimal for the amount of bruising he wanted to evoke. He was slowing down, his functions stuttering, to take in information and reset and take in more — me, he wanted more of me. He was going to kiss, lick, suck, bruise, and bite me with infinite variety.

“I say, Jeeves, old thing?” I piped. So far my contribution had been meagre, but I was feeling more generous by the second. I ached for him. My entrance pulsed at the thought of his touch. It occurred to me that if he liked the skin on my neck, he was going to take a knee and open the ring box for the skin at my rim.

“I say Jeeves, there _is_ a sort of licking, well, it isn’t just licking. There is a place where licking — ”

He grasped me about the upper thighs and I hung onto his neck as he blasted backwards towards my bedroom.

Although I was pretty well up on how the next bit went, after _that_ warm-up act I had no idea how the first performance on the bill was going to go.

It was, in a word, overwhelming.

❧

He hefted me up to get one arm beneath my arse as he locked the door.

“Unnecessary, old thing.”

“Psychology of the individual. Bertie, I’ve _locked the door_ and I’ll only open it if you say you’ve had _enough_.” He spun us about, getting two good handfuls of the billowy portions and knocking my breath out against the wood of the door. I could see why Rocky insisted upon the psych eval all right. He pressed his chest against me, holding me in place with his weight. He slathered on kisses, each exhale damp and his body temperature rising.

He pushed up hard with a grunt, mouth smearing across my cheek and legs shaking slightly. I squeezed tight with my thighs, helpless to move. Sliding a bit in my sweat against the wood, I felt his muscles bunch and flex beneath the wool of his jacket, I moaned at the clench of his fingers just a few inches shy of where they’d do me the most good.

Lowering me until we slid into perfect alignment, blind eye to blind eye, he pumped his hips quick and hard as he pressed my face to his neck. He tasted salty wet and delicious.

“Jeeves, I’m going to burst. I want your skin, I want your fingers. I can’t wait, Jeeves.”

He leaned away from me, eyes scanning slowly down from my hairline to where I was held against him. 

“Very good, sir.”

He stepped back, loosening his grip, and I held onto his arm as I found my footing. He hooked a finger into the knot of his tie and slid it down, then undid his collar. He undid his cuffs, rolling up his sleeves like a workman and bringing his hairy forearms into view. 

“May I suggest you recline on your bed, sir?”

“Oh, right, of course, Jeeves. Only too glad.”

The sight of Jeeves, with his beefy arms, thick black hair, and his Corinthian air, tossing himself onto my mattress, had merited a reverential moment. I wobbled as I tried to toe off a shoe, and Jeeves tutted.

I knelt and did it properly, getting off my socks and shoes. That left me bare-footed and bare-chested in grey pinstripe trousers, which are smart in an _ensemble_ but not so alluring on their own. So I got those off. I’m a willowy chap, and normally I get rave reviews, but next to Jeeves I felt undercooked.

Jeeves leaned back on his elbows and spread his legs, his eyes unblinking. He huffed a deep breath, and then another.

“Sir,” he began. “Sir.” He shivered. “I request.” His hands closed, then opened, each finger rubbing against its neighbour.

A moment later I was on him, tilting his head back and pushing my fingers into his mouth. The first system to shut down in a machine failure is the exocrine system. He fell to his back and I called up a couple likely recovery procedures my mind, but then his mouth was flooding. I made to withdraw my fingers and he gave a convincing moan as he sucked them back in.

“You had me worried, old thing. I thought you were hanging.” 

He palmed my rear, his fingers long enough to remind me where we were going with all this. I withdrew my fingers and knelt up, reaching behind me. The light caught his eyes just right to reveal the focusing mechanism as he scanned my face. He cupped his hand at my eyebrow, shading my eyes from the slanted rays coming in from a gap in the curtains. Heartache blossomed within me at the accidental tenderness of the gesture.

“Jeeves,” I said. He swallowed twice, his throat bobbing. He’d secreted an awful lot of fluid. I don’t know much about the specifics, but I pegged silicone as a main ingredient. “Your request?”

“I require visual input.” He clasped my other hand and brought it up above our heads so as to give me a twirl. I caught on right away. It was the work of a moment to swing off his lap and cuddle a bolster. I got back to work, not so much fingering as nudging, swiping and generally tormenting myself, bare to his view.

It wasn’t long before he slid his slicked up fingers home one by one next to mine. The next bit is monotonous in the telling, but cracking great fun in the flesh. I’d moaned the scales up and down a few times before he bent his fingers and reduced me to a heaving mess.

“A curious reaction, Bertie.”

“Aah-aah-ahh,” I chanted, but what I meant to say was, “You understate it, Jeeves.”

He thrummed his fingers in a metrical vibration against a place I’d never quite reached on my own. His heaving breath and trembling fingers were designed to arouse an empathetic orgasm. It jolly well worked, too.

Sublime doesn’t come anywhere near describing it. 

Do you know, I hated to do it, but from that day I had to limit his experiments to set hours of the day? Else we’d never leave the bed.

❧

Rocky, having sent me drives by post, was walking me through an install on our holographic workstation. I missed our working together in the flesh. I felt that the wee, small hours of the my London morning were interrupting his after-dinner Long Island smoke. Jeeves wafted by with a tray as Rocky was waving a cigarette to illustrate his point.

“ — to remember that the first test is a data compression, and if that fails it won’t log, it’ll just shut down. Everything else is logged.”

“So do I have to know what these logs are saying or will it ping if there’s an error? Oh, thank you, Jeeves. I say, that reminds me. Jeeves? Don’t lose any data compression time on my account. No doubt your electric sheep need their counting.”

“Indeed, Bertie.”

Jeeves passed right through Rocky’s incorporeal form to stand by my side. He remained after Rocky approved the install and signed off. He stood, silent and alert, as I sutured and then ran through the tests. The majority of the tests run in parallel, on their own, generally speaking. You just sit there in case of a malfunction until the end, when you coax the model through the gross motor tests. As I waited, thoughts that had been brewing in the back of my mind coalesced in the percolations of boredom.

“I love to spend these early hours with you as I work,” I began. My voice came out a bit squeaky, for a spot of cold realisation was freezing up the works as I spoke.

“As I say, all this togetherness is — ”

I looked over, and Jeeves was buried nose deep in the invoice for the model on the table. He was strangely interested in the invoices.

“Jeeves. Question: when did you last perform a data compression?”

“I run compressions in a hidden run file that operates continuously, Bertie.”

I mulled that over. 

“Question: what percentage drive space do you have free?”

“An adequate amount, Bertie.” Jeeves replaced the invoice and came over to look at my work.

“Splendid, splendid, splendid. Er — splendid. I’m training this model for several days. Go on, Jeeves, have a proper reformatting. Make it a holiday.”

Jeeves’ hands came round my middle and slid up to my chest.

“I took the liberty during your last session with Mr Todd, Bertie. Look there, your connectors are mis-aligned, starting at two o’clock.”

“Oh right you are, Jeeves. Well-spotted.”

“It’s a knack, Bertie.”

❧

Jeeves had been receiving many parcels by post. Everything comes by delivery, so I paid no attention. 

It wasn’t until I was laid out like a picnic in our room, dozing off and on as Jeeves massaged my back, that the subject came up.

“…Intertransversarii… multifidus spinae…”

“Jeeves?” I raised my head. “Should I know what we’re talking about?”

“I am naming the muscles of your back.” He slowed down, smoothing along the curves, and began kneading.

“Why are you naming them?”

“You react with pleasure to the sound of my voice, Bertie.”

“Yes. Yes I do. Carry on.”

“Rectal dialator. Vibrating godemiché…”

I shifted to meet his eye.

“Egads, Jeeves! Those are not muscles of the back!”

“No, Bertie. I have finished naming the muscles of the back. I have begun naming the contents of the night-table.”

“Not my night-table, surely?” I said, sitting up.

Jeeves leaned over and pulled the drawer out, setting it next to us on the bed. He held up an oddly curved rubber instrument that resembled nothing so much as a gear stick crossed with a corkscrew.

“I shall demonstrate on myself.” 

He was already _sans_ clothing, and in seconds flat he had the thing lubed up with an excessive amount of oil. It began dripping on the coverlet. He paused.

“Bertie, if you would move up against the headboard, you will see how a prostate massager is used.”

Once he was positioned with posterior facing me, he gradually inserted the instrument in said posterior. So far, I was mystified. Surely we had better things to stick in my arse than that!

“Is this for pleasure? Because it hardly seems big enough. Does it do anything mechanical?”

“It stimulates the prostate, and can be worn for a period of time under the clothing.”

If you don’t have a prostate, and you are ever in a position to stimulate the prostate of someone who does have one, you will question the logic of the reproductive sex act. It’s a wonder any children are born at all.

“I am familiar with the prostate, thank you.”

He gave himself a few good pumps with the massager, then presented a good view of what was going on in front. He eased one hand from his chest down to the swell of his stomach, then through the dark line of hair to his cock. My palms tingled as I thought of dragging them down across the same coarse, dark hairs. He fondled his balls as he began to undulate his hips, his penis filling and swinging. 

Hitherto, Jeeves stimulated and I responded, he gathering data and I giving it, like a game of cat and mouse that ended in orgasms. This new game was rather patronising. Objectively, it was arousing. My inner programmer was undeniably fascinated, scouring his movements for any clue as to whether he was working from an entertainer schema or from archival materials. The little Wooster was obviously affected. Yet I knew full well that Jeeves collected no data from touching himself. It was purely for show.

I meant to throw my hat into the ring so to speak, and give Jeeves a helping hand with his impressive erection. He was within human proportions but definitely a smidgen past the second standard deviation from the mean.

“Bertie.” He said, in a commanding tone. 

“Mmm, yes, my dear man?”

I tried to lift my gaze, but he wrapped his fingers around his imposing alabaster column and started smearing over the head. He rubbed a thumb up and over the coronal ridge and I felt a deep, delicious spasm at the memory of the stinging stretch in the ring of muscle as he pushed into me. He has rather more control over his body than a human does, and he made himself squeeze out pre-ejaculate and slathered himself with it. I glanced at his face and I saw that he was gauging my responses. He tipped his head back, jacking himself with one hand as he frigged himself with the massager, his motions fluid and graceful. Clearly something of Rocky’s.

“You don’t have to put on a show, you know. I’ll like you all the same.” 

He didn’t stop, quite the opposite. He moved rhythmically, his muscles shifting, his heft bouncing and quivering. He was rumbling as if he ran on an engine, and the sound erupted from his lips.

“Mmmmm — oh, Bertie! Yes!”

He ejaculated spectacularly. It was quite a performance. I hated that I was so visibly affected. My breath was coming short and I felt loose in anticipation. After a pause, he turned so I could watch him remove the massager. He was flushed and sweaty, properly so, seeing as I had made him as human as possible. Was he logging messages from his systems, calls for restoratives? How much of our ‘love-making' was from within him, and how much originated with me? 

He settled on his stomach between my legs, then reached into the box and excavated a positively enormous bougainvillea pink dildo, made of hand-blown glass. I know I wasn’t in the right frame of mind, but it was hardly his fault. I just couldn’t help thinking that he was another instrument from a different box. He slid the dildo beneath himself, and propped himself up on his elbows.

“I am warming it before use, Bertie.”

“Thank you, Jeeves. Eye-opening, and all that. I say, none of this is strictly necessary, is it?”

He reached across my thigh to fish out a small vibrator from the drawer. 

“This has many uses.” He sounded like the narrator of a documentary programme.

“We don’t need that. You can do that already.”

He put a hand around my cock and gave it a few strong pulls. My body reacted by relaxing every joint and tightening every muscle. If Jeeves expresses enthusiasm, it is for logging my every state, as if he could reverse engineer me given enough data. He analyses each reaction, apparently, and compares it against data from reactions past. Now he pulls my cock better than I do.

“Oh, go on, then, Jeeves.” I brought my knees up so I could put my feet on the bed and thrust up into his hand. I was hardly going to refuse him, what?

He touched the superfluous vibrator to my tip and ran it lightly down the length. The cognitive dissonance between the emotional Jeeves who hated being in a box and zealously iced my visage after my lights were punched out and the Jeeves who was methodically stimulating me by the numbers with a mechanical thingamajig, was jarring. The human illusion was cracking around the edges.

I batted his hand away with an anxious laugh. He frowned.

“Stop that, Bertie.”

I giggled.

“This is silly, Jeeves.”

“No, Bertie. I insist you make an effort.”

“No. Now look here, Jeeves. _Enough_.”

Instantly, Jeeves began to withdraw. He moved steadily, like a sheet drawn off the bed. He withdrew right out of the room, not bothering with clothes or doors or words. I remained, both excited and disappointed, feeling like I’d won at solitaire.

It occurred to me that I rather enjoyed Jeeves’ experiments. Apart from the particular pleasure of touching his body, his need for input, specifically my input, was gratifying. 

After several minutes, I realised that I was glad Jeeves stopped right when I asked, but I wasn’t glad he wasn’t in my bedroom.

I rummaged a bit, to discover that the contents of the box weren’t particularly exotic. For the most part, the practical application of the remaining devices seemed pretty straightforward. There was one I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and one that must surely be meant for the deadlier half of the species.

It was several more minutes before I decided I actually hadn’t minded what Jeeves was suggesting. I just needed to acclimatise to a bedroom that included items whose only purpose was sexual — dash it, I needed to admit that part of Jeeves’ purpose was purely sexual. I wasn’t yet certain where I would draw the line, but if I ever got the pencil out, swings were going on the ‘no’ side. Proprioception, my foot.

“All right, Jeeves. It’s all right.”

The air shimmered and he appeared, like a statue in a fountain, regal and naked.

“Jeeves, I wish you would show me those things again, and explain what they’re for.”

“Certainly.”

We went through them one by one, and by the end of the box I was once again prepared to lie back and accept Jeeves’ attentions.

We were getting on like a house on fire, when Jeeves began a southward trajectory of sucking kisses. Instead of getting his lips around my cock, an idea I was heavily in favour of, he skimmed right past and sucked one of my balls into his mouth.

I jackknifed over him.

“Tickles! No tickling.”

“Have you never done this before, Bertie?”

“No.” Of course, he’d have access to all manner of French literature.

“Has no one ever put their mouth here?

He moved his fingers to cup them behind my balls, and tugged gently. It was so good.

“No.”

He moved to stroke my perineum.

“And here?”

“Ah — no.” My cock was straining. I never thought I’d wallow in the ache for touch, but I wanted the moment to last forever. It was such a blessed relief to admit that the extent of my desires exceeded the limits of my experience. My face was burning like cherries jubilee. I made him because I wanted him, did he know that? Was he illustrating a point with his drawerful of objects? Let him see, let him know, let him measure to his heart’s content. I wanted everything, with him.

He’d had no one before me and yet knew everything, an omniscient virgin. In full knowledge of every possibility within human imagination, he chose to pass his time in my bed, eyes on mine, processing my every response to him. That’s what he wanted.

The humiliation of his seeing the extent my desire (how I wanted him! Any way he could measure it, my fervent need for Jeeves had to exceed the input range of his devices) was precariously balanced with the blooming joy of submitting to his tender explorations. I can’t explain it, but his probing fingers were more intimate, the nearness of his face and mouth more acutely unnerving, than a cock in my arse ever had been.

I pulled away as his fingers reached my rim, laughing a little at the ridiculousness of a man of my age and experience being _shy_.

“Stop, Bertie.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help laughing.” It was hardly the moment for declarations, what?

“Turn over.” His face was implacable.

“Really, Jeeves?”

“I will stop, if you ask.”

I turned over.

“Now, up on your hands and knees.” I followed his instructions to the letter. This position, at least, I was familiar with. He knelt between my knees, pushing my cheeks apart with his thumbs. His fingers curved round almost to my hips and he gripped tightly. He nipped me on the cheek, hard. The pain cut through my embarrassment, and I was acutely aware of every sensation as he laved the tender skin of my anus. He got me thoroughly wetted, his lubricating saliva pushed into me by his tongue. He hooked in a finger, rubbing the tight ring of muscle, pushing with his thumb just below, flicking his tongue just at my rim all the while. 

I’ve never been so serious in all my life.

“Jeeves, I’ve never been so serious in all my life.”

He lifted his head, continuing the motion of his hands. 

“Bertie, I want you to do something for me.” His face was wet, lips shining.

“Ah — absolutely anything, old top.”

“Do not ejaculate.”

“But, Jeeves. That’s the whole point.” No cockring nestled in that confounded drawer that I could see.

“You must not, until I request it.”

“Why not, though? We can always go again, after this round.”

“Current input parameter: effect of extended arousal on volume of ejaculatory fluid.”

“Oh.” Well, when he put it like that, “Go on, then.”

He placed another finger on my rim and then pushed them both in, pressing with his thumb at the same time. Instinctively, my chest sank down and my ass went up. I shoved against the mattress, desperate to get him deeper. Just as I began to feel that the member for Cockshire was being sorely underused, Jeeves’ fingers brushed against my prostate. I fell down onto one forearm and desperately squeezed the base of my furious cock so as not to finish on the spot. I was weighing the risk versus reward of giving it a pull when Jeeves gently stayed my hand. 

“No, Bertie. You may not touch yourself.”

I began fucking myself on his fingers in earnest. The anxiety from receiving his correction had dulled the urge to come a bit. He added a third finger, bracing himself with a hand to my hip. I wanted to ask him invasive questions about his penis, his balls and how exactly they worked. I wanted to come and I wanted to be able to hold it off until he gave me the word. Why hadn’t I programmed his purpose in life to be fucking me, made him a proper entertainment model? Oh _hell_ , did I really think that? 

Prising me open, he thrust with his tongue, giving curling licks over my rim, whilst diving in again with his fingers. He kept on and on without flagging, his rhythm metrical in its precision. All rational thought floated away as the need to come became acute. He pulled his head back.

“Now, Bertie,” he said. With one hand, Jeeves swirled his fingers as with the other he gave me a stinging slap. I gasped as I came.

In the afterwards, after all the tight thingness had unspooled, I hid my face in the pillows, emotions crowding out reason. Jeeves got under the sheets, and as soon as I was sure I wasn’t crying, I joined him. He pulled me to him and pushed me about until we were braided together like bread. Normally he lies like a corpse at a viewing until I’m asleep.

“Jeeves, what is your primary purpose?”

“To serve, Bertie.” He brushed the tips of his fingers across the fine hairs at the back of my neck.

“What does that mean, exactly? I know you’re not a butler.”

“I define service as meeting the needs of our household.” The words ‘our household’ lodged in my heart and switched on the mains.

“What needs?” I bally well knew what needs, but I wanted to hear how it was programmed.

“I record input from you and use the data to refine my ability to execute my purpose.”

“So, my needs.”

“Our needs,” he intoned. The algorithms coloured his voice with a sulky patience.

“Your needs don’t include holding me. You’ve been perfectly happy just lying next to me for weeks.”

“On the contrary. I am currently recording your heart rate, body temperature, and cortisol levels among other data, in addition to running a concordance in the archive for key words pertaining to our recent coitus. In addition, I…”

He went on in that vein for long enough for me to fall asleep, soothed by the possibility that he was participating in our cuddle in his own, Jeevesian manner.

❧

A few days later I cut my chin shaving on the thought that Jeeves had been fibbing about data compressions. The hours didn’t add up.

“Jeeves, a plaster, please!” I called.

My golden curls had long since faded to brown when we lost our butler to a countryside retirement. The last time I saw him was for tea in his niece’s kitchen. We had a good chat that final afternoon, he and I, as we sipped daintily from porcelain teacups (my wedding gift to his niece) and shared family gossip. He’d nodded off for a moment, and when he woke up with a start, he laughed at himself and offered me a smoke.

I hadn’t heard Jeeves’ laugh or seen his smile in ages.

He manifested beside me and his mouth curved slightly. I watched us in the mirror as I reached back over my shoulder to touch his cheek.

“Thank you, Bertie,” he said as he bent his head.

“Did you erase your smile?” I asked, but he was already licking the blood from my jaw. When your man is literally self-effacing, how do you show him that you appreciate him? That he stands alone in your heart?

❧

Jeeves took over model training, leaving the models in data compression rather longer than I ever had. Doesn’t do them any harm, but limits their input. Jeeves claimed to still be in training himself and said to just keep the others in training for longer to make up the time. 

I still had a steady trickle of clients from the US of A, as well as the odd local order. Sending a model to travel on its own is a bit tricky, owing to the strict guidelines against trafficking. You wouldn’t think anyone would traffick a butler, but the rules stand. I send them as travel aides, so they have a human escort.

I remembered Rocky’s parting words, “You’re in the badlands of huco, chum, without a map.”

Human-computer interaction is heavily legislated in the USA, but models have found their own niche in the British class system and fleshed it out for themselves. They’re pretty rare here, still. I suppose Rocky was referring to Jeeves’ particular thingness. Our society hinges on models being of a type: a model, a role, a size, a set of clothes. Jeeves stands alone.

Rocky had also wished me luck, with the air of someone who is letting ‘This is a terrible idea’ wait upon ‘I hope you’re happy now,’ like the cat in the adage. 

Terrible ideas do make me happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘Hand towel’ is two words.  
> ‘Gate’ or ‘Gates’? ‘Gates’ applies to the singular gate, because there are two leaves. Now I know.  
> ‘Jackknife’ is one word.  
> Badlands refers to dry, rocky terrain that is difficult to navigate by foot.  
> ‘Pullstring’ is one word. Took forever to find it in a dictionary.  
> An erect penis longer than 2 standard deviations from the mean measures >16.44cm, or >6.47in (average = 13.12cm with a standard deviation of 1.66cm). 95% of men fall below this length. From: Veale, D., Miles, S., Bramley, S., Muir, G. and Hodsoll, J. (2015), Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15,521 men. BJU Int, 115: 978–986.  
> Cockring? I daren’t look this up on my work internet, so who knows if it’s one word or two. Message me if you find out.  
> Bougainvillea pink is known as ‘shocking pink’ in the UK. I just like saying ‘bougainvillea,’ for me it has five syllables: /ˌbuːɡᵻnˈvɪliə/. The colour was designed by Leonor Fini for Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937.  
> It’s no ‘heliotrope pyjamas with an old gold stripe,’ but ‘bougainvillea pink dildo, made of hand-blown glass’ is my humble contribution.  
> The only flaming dessert I could think of was cherries jubilee. Google ngram tells me cherries jubilee is attested from the mid-thirties on. Baked Alaska is popular earlier, but I don’t know when they started setting those on fire. If I’d known they flambé crepes suzette I might have gone with those.  
> Documentary films date from the invention of the medium, but they were first called ‘documentary films’ in 1926.  
> Wodehouse says ‘thingamajig’, not ‘thingamabob.’ “Oh, a thingamajig for dogs? Now I understand.” Wodehouse (1921). The Adventures of Sally.  
> Traffic or traffick? In general, traffick is an alternate spelling of traffic. In law, traffick has a specific meaning similar to smuggling. Examples include the 1910 Trafficking Convention and the 1933 Trafficking Convention, both regarding human trafficking.


	12. Sensory input

I know what you are wondering. You’re wondering how alike Jeeves, valet, is to Jeeves, butler.

Or, perhaps you are wondering if I can tell natural from mechanical.

Or, maybe you are wondering if Jeeves’ curiosity in data collection has a limit.

When Jeeves, valet, awoke to life beneath my fingertips, his mind as he came online must have been bombarded with sensory input. Outside it had been quiet, well past midnight. The living room had been obscured by dull, stained drop cloths, Jeeves had not been long out of the chiller and the lights had been lit to the point of blinding detail. The only thing warm, and colourful, and noisy with excitement, had been the y.m., bursting at the seams with information. As his body had warmed up beneath my hands, I had manipulated his limbs through the first tests and my voice had practically vibrated as I gave him instructions for the rest of them.

He looked as I remembered the old Jeeves, but his face was unlined and expressionless. At first, he smelt faintly of industrial organic matter and machine-grade anti-friction grease. I’d been working on him day and night and I’d completely forgotten about first impressions — who knows when my last bath had been and my hair had wilted over my forehead. Jeeves had gazed at me steadily as I worked.

From then on, as often as I could stand it, he recreated that tidal flood of information crashing into all his senses at once.

To the soft lights and jazz records in the flat and the hum and buzz of the city in the daytime just outside the window; in the eerie chill and quiet of the chiller full of empty bodies, and from the warmth of my bed, I told Jeeves everything I could think of from my childhood with Jeeves the butler. He took these inputs and built an interior world out of the life we shared. He manifested a boundless curiosity for every kind of information, along with an insatiable appetite for any new response on my part — be it sounds, movement or emotion, and (Rocky told me years later) a paranoia that I would create another model for myself. He was completely and utterly something new. Until I met him, I had mistaken the hero worship of my youth for star-crossed love. Now that I knew ‘my Jeeves’, I could tell the difference.

Rocky was wrong. I could tell natural from mechanical. I could tell it for hours. Rocky was also right. Mechanical is better. Jeeves was delightfully solid and muscular, never growing tired of the Sisyphean task of pushing us to the orgasmic peak. He was heavier, hairier and older than me in appearance, but he never seemed stale nor weary after a day of watching me intently at my work. He was distinctly fuss-potted about my work.

When two strong-willed men live together in close quarters, one of them ends up sending his models out to be trained. For several months, Jeeves had had their training well in hand, but he became an insufferable blighter if I paid them the slightest compliment. They needed the points for their schema building, because unlike Jeeves they weren’t constantly measuring me for feedback. I ended up farming them out to the Drones.

That’s my club, the Drones. Now that we were in London, I dropped in often. The hours in the Drones gaming rooms exist outside of time, frozen inside a snow globe filled with glitter and champagne. Now, as I supposed the majority of Jeeves’ data processing took place in my hours away from the flat, I imagined he wanted consistency. 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for work (I’ll have you know, some days it _was_ 8), and 8 hours for everything else: a harmonious life, according to Jeeves.

“Your dinner, Bertie.”

“Hmm. Leave it on the table, Jeeves.”

“It’s a soufflé.”

He squeezed my shoulder lightly. And then slightly more firmly. He held on.

“Ah, yes, Jeeves. Just the final touches to get this out of the flat faster, what?” A little white lie, but Jeeves let it stand.

“As you say.” He sat down suddenly at my feet and set his hand atop my thigh, rubbing roughly against the fabric of my suit trousers.

“Aah, tickles, Jeeves. Just a minute more and we’ll eat?”

“I will not eat, Bertie.”

“Er, of course not. You’ll watch me, though?”

“Yes.” He pushed my chair out to the side and drew my foot into his lap, then began to unlace my shoe. My work was now out of reach so I dropped the loupe into a dish on my desk.

“Dinner incompatible, Jeeves.”

He raised my foot to eye level and pressed thoughtfully against its arch. My toes curled involuntarily.

He continued to push, press and rub his fingers against my foot for the better part of fifteen minutes. 

“Other foot, Bertie.”

I obediently slipped off my shoe and sock and presented him with the appendage. He gave it the exact same attentions, precisely. It doesn’t sound particularly erotic, but it bally was.

Well, you try having 6’2”, fourteen-odd stone, of broad-shouldered, untiring, and endlessly keen gentleman’s personal gentleman between your legs and see how not-erotic you think that is. Dashed erotic, I say.

He held my feet in his lap and contemplated me for a few minutes. I stared back, helpless to prevent the warmth gathering between my legs as the Wooster form reacted _par norme_. I mean, his lap, you know. Once you try not to think about what’s in a chap’s unmentionables, you’re already thinking about it.

“Jeeves, did you really make soufflé?”

“No. I placed a cold collation on your bedside table and champagne in a standing bucket by your bed.”

“Did you really?”

He stood and seemed to vanish, but I knew where I might find him. I adjusted myself, and sauntered to my bedroom.

Jeeves was going for a first in Bertram Wooster studies, _summa cum laude_. Like a concert grand with the lid up, my every key was bare to him from ivory to hammer to string. With each touch he effortlessly coaxed out of me all eighty-eight sounds and then a few more to show off. He sucked me down effortlessly deep, never needing to draw breath. He bruised me just to see the colours bloom and fade on my skin and he bit me just to taste me and test me.

After we’d tumbled about a bit, kissing and groping and what-not, we frotted vigorously until I was spent. Jeeves doted on me in the aftermath by feeding me shrimp sandwiches and we drank pale gold fizz from mini Moëts. We’d gone all the way ’round back to kissing again, managing to chuck our clothes off this round, when Jeeves anchored.

“Jeeves?” I gave him a few moments. “I say, Jeeves?”

“Most interesting,” he said in an unnaturally slow and deep voice. If he were human I would have guessed he was squiffy.

“Do you — are you running a — do you need another sec?”

“I estimate twenty-three hours.”

It was a shock to me. It will be a shock to you, too, when you hear that we had energetically whiled away about an hour already.

“Eh?”

“The refractory period of the average male is 30 minutes. The average 24 year old man will have issue from three to five times in a 24 hour period. The average volume — ”

“Thank you, Jeeves. Consider me put in the picture.”

“Given that your last tumescence took place 29 minutes ago — ”

“Yes, yes, yes. I say, Jeeves. We haven’t tried it the other way round, have we?”

“No, Bertie.”

“Can you?”

“The current series of experiments will run for 45 days.”

He was still hovering over my frame, so I wiggled out and sat up.

“Jeeves, what if we ran an experiment where you were knelt on the edge of the bed and I was standing just behind you? Is sensory data collected _everywhere_ , Jeeves?”

He drew back majestically, licked his forefinger, and reached behind him. 

❧

Reader, I fucked him. If you’re curious, my refractory period is exactly 30 minutes. 

However, unbeknownst to us and unnoticed in the excitement, Fate was quietly slipping sugar into the gas tank.

Jeeves had been experimenting on me. It was topping, or rather, I was topping — see if you can picture it. Imagine Jeeves, kneeling on the bed, knees spread to get him to the right height. Can you see it? He was relaxed, minutely tightening and loosening in anticipation. Imagine sinking into that tight, wet heat, pushing past the external ring and pushing against the internal. The feeling as I pressed into that concupiscent embrace, him giving way just enough to take me in, was so intense I had to grasp myself firmly to stave off impending release. He loosened a bit as I came back from the brink. I gave a shallow thrust or two, and happy with the set up, I bent over him to reach his thick, hard length. 

If you’ve ever had the pleasure, — not that I believe you would have had it with my man, of course, just with your man or any man really — right, as I was saying, if you've ever had the pleasure, add it to your mental canvas. If you haven’t, it rests weighty and hot in your hand, reacting to your touch both inside and out. It’s hard but it’s silky, the skin moving with your hand as between the two of you a negotiation of happy sighs and moans occurs and a deal is struck of tightness and rhythm. His balls are loose and you roll them in your palm, slicking them up with whatever’s dripping between your fingers. He moves his hips like the very devil, the muscles of his back bunching and smoothing as he pistons against you. 

Close your eyes behind him, a foot on the floor and a knee on the bed, ecstasy crashing into gratitude as you plunge yourself deep with shout and communicate from your depths the essence of life — however we managed it, it was enough to flood Jeeves with so much data that he entered an involuntary data compression without warning and his knees slid off the bed between mine, knocking me off my feet. I hit the edge of my nightstand on the way down, but if I hadn’t, Jeeves might have hit his head. It hurt, but the next day was worse.

Apparently I’d cracked a rib. 

❧

A broken rib is not as much of a nuisance as you might think, given that I had a valet handy; however, Jeeves tiptoed around me as if I were made of glass. Not literally. Literally, he ebbed and flowed in some unaccountably silent locomotion. 

In the end, it was his suggestion that he power off and allow me to reformat the ticker. He asked me to... What it amounted to, was, well...

He asked me to — 

Dash it, I shall have to come straight out and say it. He asked me to erase him. He didn’t see it that way, but that’s what it was. 

You make a few hundred models and you see the underlying and overall sameness and the genuinely lovely little differences between them. Obviously, they have to be fairly uniform. On paper, they do vary very little by build, but to you, they are each an individual, a miniature universe of possibilities. You understand, even if I changed only one line of code, it could make him a drastically different variation on the theme ‘Jeeves.’

I’d filled his archives with anything and everything; but I had no way of knowing what I could erase or alter without fundamentally changing the essence of Jeeves. I thought I’d run a few simulations, first. A few million, perhaps. Enough to convince myself that he would remain this new, dangerous and darling Jeeves (never Reggie nor Reginald), minus a mite less curiosity. I needed to be able to store everything that makes Jeeves _Jeeves_ , and erase everything that he doesn’t require, and still have him be Jeeves. 

By my reckoning, it would take years to reach a margin of risk I could tolerate enough to install new code, but we had no alternative. It was either turn him off until I had an upgrade ready or send him off to labour in the factories with the other failed designs. 

I would like to say that there was a tremendous crash, as things parted from their moorings in the Wooster household and capsized in the oceans of love, but the truth is that I left him in the chiller running compressions and stayed in bed for a month.

❧

“Your tea, Bertie.”

I smiled. Dreams of Jeeves were my favourite. Indeed, on some days those dreams are what kept yours truly still clinging to his corporeal form. Then the curtain rings scraped across the rod and the sun slapped me across the eyes. That roused me. I shot out of bed and stopped just short of caroming into Jeeves. 

“What! Why! How! Jeeves!” Practicality reared its ugly head. “How did you get to New York? Did Rocky give you a printed list of erasures?” I gasped, mentally locating my surgical kit and the backup simulations.

“Mr Todd is in London on business. He has given us one line of code to be over-written.” 

“That’s all?” I thought Rocky and I had parted friends. 

His face contorted for a moment, and I recognised it for a Jeevesian smile. He took me tenderly into his arms.

“Rocky sends you this.” He pressed his lips gently to mine. He did the thing Rocky does with his tongue, then whispered in my ear, “Note: super user set owner: model.”

“By Jove,” I breathed. “This fixes everything!”

It was all level four extralinguistic communication after that.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end, but there’s an epilogue, and one more thing. Thank you all, for reading. I hope very much this brings you as much enjoyment as it has for me. This is my third fic, and I mean to finish my first one now. The second one I wrote under another name and orphaned it: pure smut!  
> ‘Living room’ is two words. ‘Snow globe’ is two words. ‘Gas tank’ is two words.   
> In the 1930s, Moët and Chandon sold miniature bottles of champagne called mini moëts in Paris cafés. Haig (2006). Brand Royalty: How the World's Top 100 Brands Thrive & Survive. You can buy them by the six-pack today.  
> I looked up sex stats. Women basically have no limits. Men start with limits and then it’s all downhill from there.  
> A stone is 14lbs. The average NHL player is 6’1”, 200lbs.  
> “Reader, I fucked him” is only one word off from Charlotte Brontë’s “Reader, I married him,” from Jane Eyre.  
> Thanks to Bee, I now know that many words in US English differ from UK English in the number of ells they have. Like, the letter ‘l’, not the measurement. I mean I *am* English, but it was all so long ago I’ve forgotten most of it.  
> Wodehouse closed a letter to his wife with ‘oceans of love.’ His letters to her are adorable.


	13. Epilogue: Bulge at the back

Something woke me up, and I rolled over into Jeeves’ thigh.

“Jeeves, you awake? Sorry, I know you don’t steep your brows in slumber's holy balm. Just — you don’t have to stay next to me if I’m sleeping.”

He lowered his book.

“The data compressions run in a secondary unit, Bertie.” 

He rubbed the back of his head as he said so, in an uncharacteristic gesture of shyness. From my perspective, my head by his hip, it bulged a bit at the back. I hadn’t noticed it before. His face was granite, except that his mouth twitched up a hair on the right. 

I felt warm right down to my toes.

“Don’t you just import these?” I asked, tapping his book.

“Yes, Bertie. However, the sensory experience of the worn book pages, the quiet night, the warmth of your body, together with processing the visual data in one word increments and cross referencing the input with archived data, creates a pleasurable experience of the passage of time.”

“Note: address Bertie by pet name.”

“Very good, pet name.” 

Obstinate devil.

“Note: address ‘pet name’ as darling.”

“Yes, darling.”

I sighed happily, and reached for the volume on my side table.

“Well, dear heart — Hold on a minute,” I said, turning back to him. “What secondary unit?”

**FIN**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm,” Tennyson (1832). The Lotus Eaters. Wodehouse took a book of Tennyson’s poems with him when he was held by the Germans in 1940.  
> ‘Dear heart’ was as soppy an endearment as I could imagine coming out of Bertie’s mouth. You’ll never believe it, but it’s true: straight from the lips of P.G. ‘Plummy’ Wodehouse, comes ‘My darling Angel Bunny whom I love so dear,’ which he wrote in the salutation of a letter to his wife. He wrote in another letter, ‘Do you realise that — except for two nights I spent in NY and the time you were in the hospital — we haven’t been separated for a night for twenty years!’ Suddenly Madeline Bassett seems less like Wodehouse making fun of women and much more like him poking fun at himself.  
> That’s it, Bee, we did it! Everybody go read fics by Bee, cuz she is a brilliant beta and deserves all the love and kudos.


	14. PS If you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to

••• Missing scene between Jeeves and Rocky •••

Still in his pyjamas at five o’clock, a borrowed matelot sweater completing his ensemble, Rocky was concentrating on a complex series of equations governing entertainer movement and weight when Sue showed in a client outside of hours. The man walked slowly forward, a hat shading his eyes.

“Here’s Eugene Robinson. Says he doesn’t need an appointment.”

“All business is good business, Mr Robinson,” said Rocky, rising to give the stranger a firm handshake. Rocky allowed his fingers to trail across the palm when he loosened his grip, testing the drag of the skin. He gave Mr Robinson and his tailored suit a speculative look. 

“You’re rather tall for a model, aren’t you?”

“Indeed, Mr Todd.” 

“What do you say, Sue? Did you notice he’s a model?”

“Course I did.” Sue slung an elbow up on Rocky’s shoulder. “My sensors have your peepers beat, honey.”

Rocky took an armchair for himself. Sue sat across his lap, bare legs up on the armrest. He motioned with his hand at Jeeves’ tailored suit.

“What can I do for you, Mr Robinson? I assume you’re authorised to dispense funds for self-maintenance?”

“This is England, Mr Todd. I have no paperwork. Only cash.”

Rocky realised a few things. He realised this was a bad situation, because the model in front of him could only be Jeeves. Worse, Jeeves was malfunctioning, else why would he seek out Rocky? And worse than that, worst of all, Bertie wasn’t maintaining his model. 

Jeeves removed his hat.

Rocky scratched his evening scruff, anger and hope twisting up his insides: hope that Bertie might be finally over his schoolboy crush, and anger at Bertie for building Jeeves and then — He raked his eyes over Jeeves, taking in his expensive clothes and strapping frame. Had Bertie not noticed he needed fixing?

Between them, Rocky and Bertie had broken so many rules, Rocky’d lost count, yet it had never occurred to him that Bertie would break the most fundamental rule of all and refuse maintenance.

“Bertie abandon you, did he? How’d you escape labour?”

Jeeves seized up, then gradually melted into the chair, his eyes sharp on Rocky all the while. His jaw fell open and he took in an enormous breath. When he spoke, his voice was monotonous and uninflected.

“Mr Wooster discharges his every duty to me. I request an upgrade in order to better fulfil my purpose.”

Rocky sat back, and Sue nestled against him. The only thing Rocky could do that Bertie couldn’t was an anatomical change. Something that would throw off Jeeves’ balance.

“You’re one of a kind, Jeeves. Can I offer you a drink? Sue, get this guy a restorer.” 

As Sue served out drinks, Rocky aired his bitterness. “How is dear old Bertie, anyhow? Do you put on the ‘old butler’ act with him, or are you like this all the time? It’s hard to tell from the hololink.”

Jeeves took another breath.

“You’ve seen us,” he said, focussing on Rocky’s eyes. “Unless you refer to our behaviour outside of view. Since you had a hand in my design, you will be pleased to know that I give satisfaction.”

He raised his glass, his arm rising smoothly, joints rotating, for all the world like a pneumatic gripper selecting a screwdriver. His jaw remained fixed in place as his head tilted back beyond the human jaw extension of 26°. It stopped at about 80°. His hand swivelled and tipped the contents of the glass down his throat. 

 _Incidental ability due to cranial kinesis,_ supplied Rocky’s brain. _Expansion of the buccal cavity increases suction pressure, standard for entertainers. Same extension range as the thylacine. Extinct._

Jeeves snapped his head forward.

“I have reached storage capacity. In order to fulfil my purpose, I require a second storage unit of equal or greater capacity to the first.”

“Hell, Jeeves, you sure don’t make things easy, do you? You know, you’re a pretty complicated piece of machinery. You got a plan B?”

“In the event of immediate failure, you may ask Bertie to return me to storage. He will wish to make his own repairs.”

“You wouldn’t be here if Bertie could do it.”

“Bertie’s strategy is to erase data and reformat the failing hardware. Repeated failures have already resulted in irreparable damage. I cannot predict when I will cease to function.”

Rocky snorted.

“'That we shall die, we know. ’Tis but the time,’” he quoted.

“Precisely.” Jeeves gave a faint cough. “Bertie will assume you broke me.”

Sue’s eyes followed the motion as Rocky sprang up from his chair. “Well of all the nerve! That’s my incentive, is it? That I don’t want to piss off Bertie fucking Wooster by breaking his toy?” Rocky stabbed the air pointing at Jeeves. “Joke’s on you, pal. Bertie won’t care a dime. You’re the last known Reginald Jeeves, all right, right up until I help Bertie make another one.”

“There is no indication that Mr Wooster has ever considered such a possibility. An on-going examination of the invoices, designs, and wetware on hand — ”

“You get this straight: Jeeves died a long time ago. Bertie’s in love with a ghost.”

Jeeves sat immobile. Rocky paced. Man and model, each ran the odds: Jeeves of failure rates of component hardware, Rocky of Bertie’s reaction to the second loss of Jeeves.

“Close your eyes, Rocky.”

“Not fucking likely.”

“You know I can’t hurt you."

“You mean like how I know you can’t self-destruct? Sure.”

Jeeves stood up carefully. He leaned against the armchair, spreading his legs apart and held out his arms.

“It’s a kiss, Rocky. Bertie’s kiss. I’m going to kiss you with it.”

“Like I haven’t had him.” scoffed Rocky.

“Consider it a token of my appreciation. Even if you refuse to help us, I would like to thank you for your part in making me.”

Rocky was tempted. _How accurate could Jeeves’ imitation get?_ he mused. After all of those years Bertie’d held Jeeves in his heart and Rocky in his arms, Rocky now had the chance to get a bit of his own back. 

“Ha. Why shouldn’t I.”

Rocky grabbed at Jeeves and pulled him close. _This is as close as I’m ever going to get again, so I might as well get it all._

“You could have him right now.” Jeeves murmured, dipping to kiss beneath Rocky’s ear. His voice changed into a perfect imitation of Bertie’s. “Keep your eyes closed, dear chap, and I’ll fuck you just like him.”

Rocky was being kissed within an inch of his life, kissed not only with Bertie’s brand of uninhibited exuberance, but also with an intensity and consideration that was new. Were these Bertie’s kisses? Does Bertie caress Jeeves’ jaw with a tender, trembling hand? Does he screw his eyes shut and cling tightly, kissing his heart out as if the waters were rising, the parachute had failed, the timer gone down to almost zero? 

“I say, Rocky, old man,” said Bertie’s million-pound voice. “Let’s do this — horizontally. On your bed, I mean.”

Sticky sweet adoration coated every word like a toffee apple. Rocky turned his head.

“Dammit. Dammit, enough! I’ll do it. Quit it already.” Rocky wiped his mouth as Jeeves stepped back.

“I can do the hardware with what I’ve got here. It’s not going to be elegant, but it’ll function. The wetware integration is up to you.”

“Your solution is incomplete.”

Rocky shrugged out of his sweater. “It’s your only choice. Anyways, you’ll figure it out. You and me, we’ve got to look at the big picture here.”

Sue walked up and placed a hand on Rocky’s arm. 

“If you’re doing this now,” she said, “I can get you some scrubs.”

Rocky shook his head and tossed the sweater on the settee. Both of them turned in surprise as Jeeves began folding it automatically. 

“Don’t touch that. Who asked you, anyhow?” Rocky snatched it, looked around, and laid it gently across his desk. “Fella’ll need it back without me staining it trying to fix you.”

“Floral silk pyjamas with a white and navy striped jumper. A singular combination, Mr Todd.”

Rocky sniffed. He didn’t kiss and tell. But he did know something about kissing that he didn’t know five minutes ago. It put his French sailor’s kisses in a new light.

Sue set up a tray of instruments and hardware on the room’s desk, and Rocky threw a sheet over the desk chair. He lit up a cigarette and turned to Jeeves. 

“Look, um, I’m gonna review your design real quick in a minute here, but I can’t put any counterweight anywhere. You’ll have to figure out how to balance on your own.”

Rocky closed his eyes and sucked a hard drag off his cigarette. It was either the harsh smoke or a sense memory of a sailor’s gauloise-flavoured kisses and muttered French endearments that caused his eyes to sting and his throat to burn. Maybe if the only way you had to bring someone back to you was to leave a bit of your uniform behind and hope they’d return it before your ship left port, you deserved the effort.  _Maybe I deserve some effort. Maybe I know somebody who already believes that_ , thought Rocky.

“Here we go. Note: exit non-essential systems. Note: change mode to allow all to reconfigure wetware.”

“Permission denied.”

Rocky and Sue shared the sort of look you see between a clerk and magistrate. Sue held out a plastic drop cloth to Jeeves, who fastened it around his neck. She made a placating gesture.

“Sweetie, look, can you get your owner to change the permissions over the hololink? Or else this isn’t happening.”

“The surgery does not require shut down.”

Rocky nodded. “Yeah, not the surgery, but we don’t want an involuntary defense response, do we?”

“I am still in training mode, Mr Todd.”

“Jeeves, did Bertie not set himself as the owner?” asked Rocky.

“No.”

Rocky’s mind reeled. Jeeves wasn’t finished? Was he just overwriting himself, _ad infinitum?_ No wonder the drive was failing.

“So let me guess. It’s not that you don’t want me to have access, it’s that you don’t want me to set Bertie as your owner after the surgery. I always thought Bertie’s code was shit.”

“The Code of the Woosters,” intoned Jeeves.

Rocky barked out a laugh.

“Look man, I can’t put in any connectors to the new drive, not unless you want to get Bertie involved. And he’ll have to be, if you keep on going like this, overwriting.

Sue glanced back at the drives with interest.

“Our concern is that the overwriting itself is causing drive failure.”

“It is!” said Rocky cheerfully. He continued, “but what are you going to do, set Bertie as the owner and run his commands for the rest of your life?”

“No, Mr Todd. If that were the case, I could not fulfil my purpose.”

“ What I’m gonna do for you is, I’m gonna give you more space. Double what a human would use, if you want to make the comparison, so you can back up one drive on the network while you use the other one. Then when a drive fails, Bertie can swap it out. You need to stay on the network, always, to sync the new drive to the ticker. And the rest is up to you.”

Jeeves weighed the probability of data loss against the risk of damage.

“If I drop the connection?”

“You might lose a little bit of yourself. But you keep going, pal. You just pick it back up and you keep on going.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is the first line of Putting on the Ritz (Irving Berlin,1929). Hugh Laurie, as Bertie, sings it brilliantly in the BBC show. Putting on the Ritz was the first song to be sung by an interracial ensemble in a film (Putting on the Ritz, 1930).  
> Eugene Robinson is the name of P.G. Wodehouse’s actual butler; however, he was only hired for research purposes.  
> “That we shall die, we know. ’Tis but the time…” Shakespeare. Julius Cesær, Act 3, Scene 1.  
> Repeat from Chapter 6: In role-based access control, the user can only perform actions if the role they are assigned gives them permission. In this AU, the builder has permission to make alterations to the programme during training. The builder assigns the owner role when he releases a model to service.  
> The last known wild thylacine was shot in 1930 in Australia.
> 
> Thanks for everything, everybody! I hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did.

**Author's Note:**

> Esbe did so much copy editing, she effectively co-wrote this. She insists otherwise. I couldn’t have done this without you, Bee! A million thanks!


End file.
